Council member pay and expenses were up for debate on Tuesday as council was set to receive a final report from the committee tasked with reviewing members’ pay and benefits.
The council remuneration review committee report recommends several significant updates to the policy, changing the way councillors are reimbursed for their work and expenses on city business.
Council ratified a committee to conduct the current review last year. The five-member committee, chaired by resident Larry Kirkpatrick, was scheduled to appear at the Sept. 6 meeting, which took place after press deadline on Tuesday.
The report, which was made public on Friday afternoon with the rest of the council agenda, suggests a significant increase in base pay for council members, which would be offset by removing the per-diem payments for full-day meetings.
The base salary for the mayor would be $125,000 per year, and councillor salaries would increase to $50,000. This is up from the 2015 base salaries of $104,172 and $36,460, respectively.
The committee notes that when factoring in per-diem payments, these figures are in line with the handful of municipalities in the province that have been used as comparison.
“With the removal of the per diems and adding these amounts into the base amount of salary in fact makes the salary competitive with our seven comparable municipalities,” the report says.
Those figures would increase on April 1 of each year, in the same percentage amount as increases to the Edmonton Consumer Price Index.
The report also recommends councillors remain classified as part-time, instead of moving the job up to full-time, based on consideration of how much time councillors appear to spend working on council business, The report indicates it is about 20 to 30 hours per week including preparation for and attendance of council and committee meetings, as well as meeting with constituents.
The report acknowledges this does include community functions and meetings of external boards, such as the Alberta Urban Municipalities’ Association and the Federation of Canada Municipalities, which may mean added hours for councillors, but said those extra hours are discretionary.
“It is the opinion of the Committee, these are discretionary decisions of Councillors and therefore should not factor into the equation,” the report states.
In addition, the committee recommends beginning council meetings later in the day than the current 2 p.m. start time, in order to accommodate councillors who may be working full-time in another capacity. The start time is described as a deterrent for potential candidates.
The meeting time was moved from 4 p.m. to 3 p.m. following the 2010 election, and was bumped up again to 2 p.m. last year, a decision Mayor Nolan Crouse has said actually increases public accessibility and promotes better decision-making.
“I have always had the impression that the later a meeting goes the quicker decisions are made so when you start to get into 8 or 9 p.m. you start to rush through decisions,” he said at the time.
The last time council pay was reviewed was in 2012. Councillors voted to accept the recommendations of that review committee and bump up their salaries.
At the time the base salary for councillors rose from $29,500 annually to $31,500 and the mayor’s base salary was increased to $90,000 from $88,000. Councillor pay has been pegged at 35 per cent of the annual salary the full-time mayor earns. Both are subject to annual increases based on inflation.
See Saturday’s edition of the St. Albert Gazette for more on council discussion of the report.
