Council Salaries And Reimbursed Expenses

The things that you read buried in the Council Communications package!

Here is the one that we have all been waiting for. Once again, Councillors effectively awarded themselves a salary bonus. This time the amount is about 40%. Over and above their salary, they also received almost $12,000 in additional remuneration from pooled Board payments.

As members of the various Boards and Commissions, Councillors receive remuneration for attending meetings. Rather than fighting over being appointed to the high paying Boards, the Councillors have agreed that all of the money received would be pooled and shared equally amongst each other.

I must admit I have always wondered if what is being done is proper from a tax perspective. Assume that one Councillor makes $40,000 in Board payments and another only $10,000 .Once pooled, each of them receives $25,000. just because the first Councillor wants to be generous. Why isn't that Councillor taxed on the $40,000 earned Presumably someone has already opined on this subject and what is being done is acceptable to Revenue Canada.

85% of the extra payments from Board payments came from Enwin and WUC. I thought all the problems have been solved at these entities quite some time ago so why is there the need for so many Board meetings. Mind you, this is a case where problems are good. Without them, Councillors would hardly be making any extra money at all.

I wonder how I can get a breakdown to see how much each Councillor actually received from each of the entities before the amounts were pooled. I will write to the Treasurer and see if he will give me this information.

I had one other question. Do you remember when Ward One's Councillor formerly known as Councillor Budget stood up at the end of a Council meeting and out of the blue told everyone how generous he was and that he was not going to receive a CPI salary increase. That was a 2% increase on his Councillor salary I believe. Did all of the other Councillors go along with him and agree not to receive this increase? I ask the question because everyone's base salary is the same.

Then there was a category of Reimbursed Expenses. I must admit I'm not quite sure exactly what makes up these expenses. It might have been a much more significant and meaningful for taxpayers if Council actually revealed all of the expenses incurred by the Mayor and Councillors.

Take a look at those of the Mayor for all of last year. From looking at this, one would wonder exactly what the Mayor did for for us in 2007. It is obviously not fair to make that comment but if we had all of his expenses then we would know how hard he worked for us. Wouldn't you be interested in knowing for example how many trips he took and where he went and why? I know I would.

Don't you find it hilarious that Eddie took a legal course in "entrepreneurship." Too bad that he did not take one in running a City. Given the failures that he is responsible for in projects that he has undertaken so far, I wonder if he absorbed anything that he learned.

For the Councillors most of the expenses were in relation to trips that they had undertaken. They ranged from trips to London Ontario to those to China and Japan. On several occasions, Councillors went on trips on behalf of the Mayor. Remember the big problem that former Councillor Cassivi had when he did that and the Mayor did not support him when his expenses were questioned. Now the Councillors specifically mentioned that they took a trip on behalf of Eddie.

The biggest spender was Councillor Valentinis while the lowest spenders were Councillors Brister and Gignac.

I can hardly wait for certain people to praise Brister and Gignac for their pennypinching. Councillor Brister only spent $78.98 while Councillor Gignac spent nothing at all. Clearly those two must be thinking of running for mayor because they are following the Eddie Francis technique of ensuring that your competition runs up a big bills while you run up very little.

But while that is so wonderful from the point of view of not spending money, it also means that these Councillors are not learning anything by not attending conferences. They are not networking with people in other municipalities in Canada and around the world to learn what works and does not work in other jurisdictions.

One need only take a look at the reports prepared by Councillor Hatfield and Councillor Postma that are also posted on the Communications Package to see what ideas they have brought back to our Council that we may or may not be able to use.

The other interesting posting was that of payments made to members of other Boards who are not members of Council. The highest paying Board is the Police Commission. The total paid for all these Boards to citizens equalled just over $41,000. The total paid to Councillors equalled just over $117,000 or almost 3 times as much.

Let me see if I can get the actual expenses of each of the Mayor and Councillors so I can do a posting of that.