Lantzville Administration - Too 'Big and Rich' For Its Residents?!?

TO BEGIN, A QUESTION?
Why does Mayor Haime present the 5-Year Financial Plan and not the Director of FINANCial Services or the Deputy Director of FINANCial Services, both highly paid individuals who could probably use the practice of speaking to and interacting with the Public?

The saga of Council remuneration has been long and tortuous, including several 'fits and starts'. I understand that setting your own salary, especially in the public realm, is not an easy undertaking and that is why I have always supported using a logical, well-defined, fact-based process.

There were at least 3 remuneration committees in Lantzville during the past 18 years or so who took on the task of considering the workload of the Improvement District Trustees and making recommendations to them on what they should be paid and have reimbursed as expenses. Since, I, myself, was Chair of one of those committees, I know that some effort went into determining exactly what the Trustees did, how much time their duties took and what that was worth to the community. So, now we have progressed? to where the Councillors themselves will determine what they should be paid. They will sometimes arrange it so that any changes won't apply to them, only the next council, but I would ask you to take a guess at how many of them will be running in the next municipal election in order to 'see their agenda fulfilled'.

Now for the story so far - District of Lantzville council, after initially 'taking charge' and resolving, at their Regular Meeting on Mar. 12/07, to strike a 'Task Force' of residents to review current Mayor and Councillor remuneration and reimbursements and then make recommendations to Council, then rescinded that motion at their May 28th Regular Meeting. The reason given for this about-turn was that staff were having difficulty selecting community members to serve on said 'Task Force' and staff felt that Lantzville residents may not possess the specialized knowledge/experience required to perform the job. Some in our community have suggested that the real reason behind this 'change of horses' is that some members of Council were worried that a Citizen's Committee would actually end up recommending a pay CUT!

So, there you have it! Based on a recommendation from staff, the sole basis for deciding what our local politicians are to be paid is what other politicians in municipalities with 'similar' populations are being paid. While the increases then under consideration, 36% for the Mayor and 26% for each Councillor (followed by 'cost-of-living'), which were to be given second and third reading at the Nov. 12th Regular Council Meeting, are based entirely on the average remuneration for municipalities in the 2600-5000 population range ($17,656 for the Mayor, $8,969 for the Councillors), the actual range of 'indemnities' goes from $8000 for the 2762-peopled Village of Cumberland to $35,626 for the 4963-peopled Town of Osoyoos. This, by itself, should convince any thinking person that population averages alone don't nearly tell the whole story. All of the others below this amount on the list could argue that they too deserve a raise up to the 'average'. As I wrote in the initial installment of this piece, every time averages are used to determine a pay raise, the average increases and then everyone else thinks they're due for a raise, as well, and round and round it goes, driving up the cost to the taxpayers. A committee should have been struck, perhaps by random selection from the tax roles, and they should have developed 'metrics' for the position of Mayor and Councillor (meetings attended, emails/phone calls handled, files handled, issues resolved, etc.) and that should have been used as a basis for recommending the remuneration package. There also needs to be some recognition of the possibility that some of our representatives might be tempted to take advantage of the system and actually do very little.

Staff also cited as further justification for these increases the demands "of establishing Lantzville as a new municipality". Surely, even if these increases had been implemented then (a full 4 years after Lantzville's incorporation), it would be hard to convince anyone that much work relating to this item remained to be done. At the November meeting, the motion to accept the staff recommendation failed on a tie vote (with Mayor Haime, Councillors Haime and Parkhurst voting 'in favour').

From the above discussion, I think you can see that Council originally balked over concern at the 'optics' of giving themselves increases of 36% for the Mayor and 26% for Councillors but came back 'strong' a couple of years later (Feb. 22/10) and gave the Mayor 44% and the rest of Council 37% over 3 years, presumably to make up for the 'paltry' cost-of-living raises they had received in the meantime! During the discussion over these raises, the Chartered Accountant-laden Council made the comment that "the increase goes over 3 years so it is less than a 2% increase since we incorporated in 2003". While I am no accountant, I do operate a pretty mean calculator and I get the increase to be 4% per year for the Mayor up to 2010 and 3.6% per year for Councillors, also up to 2010. If we project that to when the raises will have taken full effect, it becomes 5.8% per year for the Mayor and 5.3% per year for Councillors, quite a discrepancy from 2%!

So here, after much work and many hours of effort in order to find, understand, authenticate and format, is a spreadsheet summarizing Council and senior staff remuneration and expenses since Lantzville's incorporation as a municipality in 2003, where those numbers are available (you can scroll 'up' and 'down', 'left' and 'right' in order to view the entire table:


Although it is indicated on the spreadsheet, it is important enough to be worth repeating that fully one third of Council salaries are tax-free, giving them an approximate 15-25% 'boost' on that amount. Also, money that Council spends on convention/conference attendance is, for some reason, not included with their expenses. This amounted to an additional $17,469 in 2009 and $12,577 in 2010.
It is also worth repeating that, Councillor Negrave tried to give back his raise in 2010 but others on Council expressed concern about how this would look so he seems to have agreed to now take the full salary. Whether or not he then donates the annual salary 'bump' to a worthy charity or cause, I don't know.

I have also tried to sort out the 'benefits' associated specifically with the salaries of Council and senior staff in the above table but, with the limited information available to the public, it is just not possible. What I can tell you, based on information in Schedule C fromo the District's annual Financial Statements, is that the total 'wages, salaries and benefits' cost in 2010 was $820,016 ($772,718 in 2009) and the total cost for 'training, travel and conferences' for 2010 was $56,970 ($57,180 in 2009). If we add these 2 numbers together, we get $876,986 for 2010 ($829,898 in 2009), which represents the total District Council and staff costs, except for 'Consulting' costs (assumed to be for Pam Shaw, Graham Savage, etc.), which were $16,212 in 2010 ($50,595 in 2009). It is not clear where Council and staff 'expenses' are accounted for 'Other'?).

Unless you've been living under a rock, most people living in the Nanaimo area now know that Gerry Berry, until fairly recently the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) of the City of Nanaimo was, in 2007, the 11th highest paid local government official in the province (in absolute terms) at $219,017/yr. The 'odour' of him 'retiring' two years later and collecting an almost half million dollar 'severance' package is a whole other topic of discussion! Since Nanaimo had a population of ~81,500 people at the time, this works out to be approx. $2.70 per resident/yr. (~$7.80 per household/yr.).

After receiving a steady series of increases, culminating in a 6.5% raise from $115,694 in 2009 to $123,216.57 in 2010 and, with an estimated population of only 3750 residents, Twyla Graff, the CAO of the District of Lantzville, is now being compensated to the tune of $32.90 per resident/yr. (~$92.00 per household/yr.). As well, the administrative budget alone of the then Lantzville Improvement District, now the District of Lantzville has increased from $193,167 to $819,116 since incorporation in 2003. Can anybody think of a really good reason why this should be or have any thoughts on what appears to be a very generous pay package for the 'Captain' of the 'good ship Lantzville'. If so, please let me know at vigilantz@hotmail.com!

I had hoped to be able to provide you with comparisons to our senior staff salaries for communities 'similar' to Lantzville but, after trying repeatedly for more than 3 weeks to have Jedha Holmes, Deputy Director of Financial Services devote a little time to helping me obtain that publicly mandated information through civicinfo.bc.ca, I am down the time it took to compose and reply to the several emails involved but I am certainly no further ahead. It is a matter of the District office investing about 10 minutes to help a resident of Lantzville obtain information which is legislated to be out in the public realm or me spending many hours navigating through 22 different community's websites looking for that information. I still plan on publishing those comparisons as soon as time to gather them permits so be sure to check back here every now and then.