Councillor and mayoral expenses continue to draw public interest following administration’s recent examination of how our elected city officials are spending tax dollars.
We commend the city for putting expenses online for all to see. That kind of transparency is what this city needs to help resolve some of the controversy and doubt that has arisen since questions over Mayor Nolan Crouse’s double billing for his Capital Region Board duties and city expenses arose.
But more needs to be done and Crouse is not the only member of council who has made gaffs with expenses.
It was interesting to learn that councillor spending is capped at $5,000 annually and the mayor has an expense limit of $7,000 – not including a budget to represent the city in an official capacity.
That funding cap, however, has revealed yet another flaw in the way council reports its expenses. Cathy Heron’s expenses for last year totalled $12,628. Not only is that the highest of all councillors, it is more than double the expenses cap.
Heron said that total includes per diems paid to her for attending CRB meetings, but the CRB reimburses the city for her time. If that is the case, those per diems should not be factored into the expense totals. To the uninitiated – read: most taxpayers – that is confusing.
In a previous editorial we questioned expenditures such as making taxpayers pick up the tab for every coffee a councillor drinks during meetings, or for Internet bills they would have incurred anyway, but recent reports reveal there have been other claims that are even more questionable.
Before leaving council, Gilles Prefontaine spent $1,500 of his councillor development money to make the city a bronze sponsor of Alberta Green Building Symposium. Essentially a donation, councillors should not be using taxpayer money for sponsorships, nor should a single councillor be allowed to spend money to lend the city’s name to an event as a sponsor.
While the symposiums may have been worthwhile, city branding should only come after a vote of council as a whole, not to prop up an individual councillor’s pet projects.
Another example of questionable expenses comes from Coun. Cam MacKay, a self-styled fiscal hawk, who billed the city nearly $260 for a 36-month subscription to the Rosetta Stone’s Tagalog language program. Included in the expense was a $26 pair of headphones so he could listen to the lessons.
MacKay justified the expense by saying Tagalog is growing exponentially in the city and is the fastest growing language in the region.
According to Statistics Canada, in 2011 Tagalog was the second most common unofficial language in Alberta at 1.9 per cent of the population. In St. Albert, it was third at .8 per cent of the city’s population.
The numbers are a bit irrelevant, though. If a councillor wants to learn a language other than French or English – the languages of business in this country – they should do so on their own dime.
A lot needs to be done about how council handles its expenses. The question may be that while an overall policy already exists, some members of council may define the term reasonable expenses far too broadly. And while solid policy always helps, more common sense would also not hurt.
