A special council meeting was requested last Wednesday to review the mayor and council wages.
Recommendations were presented to council in camera from a Council Remuneration Committee and squeaked through with a recorded vote of 4-3 in favour during the public meeting. The adjustments now put councillor paycheques at $15,000, up from the about $11,000 they were receiving per year and the mayor seeing a slight raise from about $19,000 to $26,000.
Mayor George Lattery said the special meeting was called rather than putting the motion forward at the regular meeting on May 7 to make sure the committee’s recommendations were heard.
“It had to do with wages and this committee was put together to make recommendations and we thought it would be in the best interest for them to come to a meeting and present it rather than think their recommendations weren’t being heard,” said Mayor Lattery. “We wanted to make the point that they could come in and be heard and rather than wait to get it done we got it over with now.”
Mayor Lattery was one of the three who voted against the recommended pay raise because he said it doesn’t represent the amount of hours or work the council put in for the job.
“(The recommendations) were very unfair, un-equitable and they didn’t have their facts straight. All we want them to do is put us in the same ball park as other towns of equal size, just ball park not ahead,” said Mayor Lattery.
According to the mayor he works 40-60 hour weeks and rarely has had a day off, if any, because of the weekend meetings and conferences he also attends.
“Council members are putting in a lot of hours and this may have worked 15 years ago when the town was 3,000 to 4,000 people but now it is close to 12,000 and everything is changing. I don’t work a five day work week and coming in I knew this but we are putting in a lot more than required just trying to do my job,” he said.
According to the Town of Cochrane website 2006 financial statements, first-term councillors were receiving $20,640 and the mayor earned $35,088. Both of these amounts are the totals before the addition of benefits. Mayor Lattery said he talked to Town of Cochrane Mayor Truper McBride and right now he is actually making $45,000 plus expenses and benefits.
“That is a minimum of $55,000 and the councillors are at $35,000 right now and those numbers are straight from Truper himself and he said they are even reviewing those numbers right now. I also talked to the mayors in Canmore, Banff, High River, Airdrie and I know all of them. A lot of people looked at the websites and they are not updated because they got those facts from 2006 and it is 2008,” said Mayor Lattery.
Councillor Mike Lloyd and Brad Walls were the other two who voted against the pay raise.
“I strongly believe there are more benefits to raising council wages to attract better people but I think it should be implemented after the next election,” said Lloyd.
Councillor Earl Best questioned the logic behind the comments of not raising the wages until the next election. Best said he couldn’t see any employee being satisfied without receiving a raise for three years. The councillor said after the meeting that he wished this item would have come to council at a later date.
“I by no means do this for the money and we knew what it paid and how much time it took before we came in. I think that this should have waited until things like the effluent line and annexation have been settled. We should have waited to get the big problems out of the way first,” he said.
Town CAO Dwight Stanford told the mayor and council that the committee, which was made up of public members, researched the salaries of several communities of similar size that surround the City of Calgary. He said the average was around $44,000. Other communities such as Lacombe or Ponoka were found to be between $1,000 or $2,000 lower than that.
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