How much should city councillors get paid? But more importantly, how should the city decide what is an appropriate amount?
Prince George city council will be looking at that very question Monday night.
Currently, council remuneration is recommended by a committee that is struck in the final year of a council’s term. That committee looks at similar communities to determine remuneration, benefits, and expense reimbursement for the mayor and councillors. The communities examined are: Chilliwack, Kelowna, Sannich, Langley, Delta, Kamloops, North Vancouver, Nanaimo, Victoria, and Coquitlam.
The committee struck last year recommended the new mayor be paid one per cent more than the previous mayor and that the new set of city councillors be paid 3.5 per cent more than the previous council.
That would move the mayor’s salary from the current $129,461 per year to $130,755 in the new year. It would move the stipend for city councillors from the current $37,908 to $39,234. It also recommends similar increase on January 1, 2024. A final decision, however, was delayed until the new council could examine the issue.
City staff has recommended two options for council.
The first is to simply change the list of peer municipalities.
“The intent would be to remove and/or replace one or more cities on the list with other cities that are more similar to the City of Prince George in terms of population, trends or challenges,” reads a report to council.
The second option is to ditch the committee review of peer municipalities completely and provide for automatic future annual adjustments to mayor and council remuneration based on one of the following:
(a) the currently established formula for annual adjustments as set out in the bylaw (which is the annual per cent wage increase applied to City of Prince George exempt staff salaries; or the average of the wage adjustment for the second, third, and fourth quarter of the previous year and the wage adjustment for the first quarter of the current year for the public administration industry published by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada as the Average Annual Percentage Wage Adjustments by Quarter); or
(b) the annual rate of change as adjusted by the Consumer Price Index, British Columbia,
over the previous 12 months; or
(c) the annual increases provided to Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs); or
(d) the annual increases provided to Members of Parliament (MPs).
