 | Saturday, July 16, 2022
Reading this online? Sign up to get this delivered to your inbox every Friday. | | Should overseeing a city be a part-time job paying minimum wage? In most B.C. towns, it effectively is | | |  | | | Are local politicians in Langley City overpaid or paid correctly?
This week, we revealed the salaries of every mayor and councillor in British Columbia. Sifting through 160 Statements of financial information and email forms, we found the numbers, plotted them out on a spreadsheet, and compared them to local populations. Overall, most municipalities pay the same as others of similar sizes, which means, unless you’re in a big city, sitting on council is paid like a part-time position, under $35,000 a year.
But then there’s Langley City: the community has less than 30,000 people, but a base council salary is around $60,000, while the mayor makes more than $130,000.
It’s an extreme outlier when it comes to the rest of the province. But one could make the argument that it’s everyone else who has it wrong.
“If you look at the overall budget of Langley City, it is like a fraction of a per cent,” said Langley City Coun. Nathan Pachal.
The math bears that out. If you gave Langley’s mayor and six councillors a “normal” salary for its population, it would save the city about $230,000 a year.
Or 0.39% of the city’s yearly revenues.
In the vast majority of B.C., municipalities, when you factor in the public hearings and the community events and the reading 100+ pages of documents each week, councillors end up making a minimum wage salary. It comes with no pension, and outside of mayors and the rare councillor who sit on regional government, no additional revenue.
In doing so, it significantly reduces the number of people who can afford to take on the four-year commitment.
“If you're looking to attract people into government, especially younger people like myself, you have to make sure that the salaries are comparable to what you would get in the market as well,” said Pachal.
Raising salaries is always fraught, especially in smaller towns where everyone is connected by two degrees to someone else. And there’s an argument to be made that councillors should approach their role as that of a board member (executing high-level strategy) rather than a CEO (being involved on a day-to-day basis).
But we’ll see in the next four years if Langley City remains an outlier. | | | Better know a local election: Saanich | | | | | | | | | | |  | | | It’s the ninth biggest municipality in Metro Vancouver, but Saanich can sometimes fly under the radar politically.
Some of that is not being a regional centre like Kelowna or Prince George. Instead, it’s next to Victoria, which due to its central location and political culture, finds itself in the headlines much more often.
But Saanich has long been one of the most fascinating municipalities in the province, a mix of very urban neighbourhoods and farmland, facing many of the same pressures as every big city while sometimes functioning as a suburban appendage to Victoria.
And in three months, it could have one of the most competitive mayoral races in the province.
“It’ll be a good turnout and a close race,” said Frank Leonard, who served as mayor from 1996 to 2014, in assessing the two candidates.
The incumbent is Fred Haynes, who is seeking re-election after defeating incumbent Richard Atwell in 2018. He can list off a host of things he’s advanced as mayor and says he needs a second term to complete his agenda.
The challenger is Dean Murdock, a three-term councillor who topped the polls in 2014 before leaving politics the last four years.
Neither of them are particularly partisan individuals, and both talk about the need to densify housing in Saanich — Haynes saying "the single-family home approach, which is the history of Saanich, can no longer be sustained’ and Murdock saying ‘the needs of the community are changing."
But there are differences.
In our interviews, Atwell talked more about a competitive business climate and policing, while Murdock spoke more about sustainability and urbanism.
And the campaign might get a bit rough: Murdock said Haynes failed to create a cohesive council, citing a split 5-4 vote on a budget that raised property taxes by seven per cent.
Haynes rejected the charge of a split council and said that when he and Murdock were on council at the same time, “I brought solutions to many problems that were intractable, and that individual was never able to solve.”
It may not be the stuff of political fireworks that attracts attention on the Mainland. But it’ll be a substantive debate for Saanich residents. | | |  | | | 1. Surrey | | | The final 100% confirmation for the SkyTrain extension to Langley City for 2028 was approved by the province, a feather in Doug McCallum’s cap as he seeks re-election. But he’ll be in for a fight, with Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal set to officially throw his hat into the ring and a Supreme Court judge noting the many controversial actions of McCallum and his supporters in a ruling ordering Surrey to amend its sign bylaw.
Read more | | |  | | | 2. Conflict of interest? | A long-running legal saga around Vancouver Coun. Michael Wiebe saw another twist this week, as the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled that he was in a conflict of interest voting for changes to fast-track patio approvals during the pandemic due to owning a business that would benefit — but it didn’t rule on whether, with an election looming, he should be disqualified.
Read more in Vancouver is Awesome | | | |  | | | 3. Safe streets | Many municipalities have enacted “safe streets” bylaws to try to ban aggressive panhandling, violent confrontations or other activities seen as disruptive by predominantly homeless people in downtown cores. The success of some actions taken as a result can be debated, but this week Terrace passed its own bylaw while Prince George expanded theirs. Read more | | | | | |  | | | 4. Penticton | But conflicts over local homeless populations at city halls play out in non-bylaw ways as well. Many Penticton residents joined a social media group to share information about stolen property. RCMP say what they're doing could put their personal safety at risk and the mayor is asking folks to lower the temperature — while calling on the province to do more.
Read more | | | |  | | | 5. Name changes | With an eye toward reconciliation, three communities made steps this week on changing their identities: New Westminster voted to phase out its branding as the “Royal City,” Powell River released its report on changing its name, which honours B.C.'s first superintendent of Indian Affairs, and the province gave the green light to change Queen Charlotte to Daajing Giids. Read more | | | | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
forwarded to you. | | | | That's it for this week! In the meantime, check out the latest headlines at cbc.ca/bc and follow our municipal affairs reporter Justin McElroy on Twitter. And if you have any questions you might want answered in a future mailbag, drop Justin a line at metromatters@cbc.ca. | | | |
