City of Brantford Council received a report from the Citizen’s Remuneration Review Committee (CRRC) during its Committee of the Whole, Planning and Administration meeting on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.
Earlier this year, the committee, which is composed of local citizens, was tasked with reviewing the remuneration structures of the City’s elected officials.
During the meeting, David Prang, Chair of the CRRC, explained that the committee met with a mandate to look at how much City Council representatives are compensated, how their compensation is used, and then with that information, the committee provided a recommendation for future councils.
Among the recommendations, the committee suggested that councillors should be paid $32.71 an hour and that their pay be based on a 25-hour work week rather than the current 15 hours.
The change would see the pay rate for councillors in the new term of council jump from $36,085 (2023) to around $42,523. The recommendation was that the increase take effect on January 1, 2027, and that starting in 2025, economic adjustments would be added to the hourly rate over the next three years.
Also up for discussion was the recommendation to review the $250 per meeting stipend for councillors sitting on the planning committee.
Councillor Greg Martin moved an amendment to replace the word “reviewed” with “removed” and while Councillors Dan McCreary and Richard Carpenter were in agreement with Martin’s amendment, Councillor Rose Sicoli wasn’t so sure.
“. A lot of our bylaws mandate that one ward councillor should be sitting on a lot of our committees and just the time of day that a lot of these meetings are held, quite often creates an unbalance of workload between ward mates,” said Sicoli. “…The planning committee requires a lot of extra work. There’s a lot of reading, and there’s a lot of detail that goes into planning applications.”
She said for that reason she wouldn’t be supporting the amendment, but a short while later, it was carried 8 to 3.
With the councillors officially being added to City Hall’s pay grid, many of the councillors were supportive of the committee’s recommendations, while others weren’t completely sold.
Councillor Linda Hunt said that while she appreciated that the committee recognized that many of the councillors were already working over the current 15-hour work week, she had some concerns.
Hunt noted that with councillors currently making around $48 an hour at 15-hours a week, bumping the hours to 25, but lowering the wage to $32.71 would reduce their pay by 33 per cent.
She then asked Anita Szaloky, Brantford’s Director of Human Resources, what the new pay rate would be equal to in a City staff position, and Szaloky said that it would be equivalent to an entry-level administrative assistant position.
“I do think that the public should know that the recommendation to pay councillors based on what we’ve heard from our HR department, is what an entry level administrative assistant makes for the City,” said Hunt. “That does not speak well to recognizing the work, the leadership that’s required, and the sheer decision making that we have to do here as a single tier municipality.”
However, Martin later said that some of the councillors weren’t looking at the increase as a salary.
“The placement on the grid, it’s just a convenient way to change it from once every four years to a yearly increase. It’s less than four per cent a year for the increase and it’s not out of line with what some of the people are getting in the private sector and public sector,” said Martin. “Once you consider that it’s an increase that covers off four years, it doesn’t look so bad. I really like what they’ve done by going to a spot on the grid, it allows it to go up annually, instead of a big jump with the new council. I think this is far more appropriate, and I’ll be supporting what’s been recommended.”
Another part of the review’s recommendation centered around the Mayor’s pay.
After comparing what Mayors in other similar sized municipalities are being paid (between $110,000 to $116,000), the committee recommended that when the new council comes into office in 2027, the mayor’s current pay of $125,527 a year (2023 dollars), should remain around the same.
Mayor Kevin Davis said there was more to the comparisons between municipalities, noting that Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge aren’t single tier municipalities like Brantford, but lower tier municipalities.
He said that the Mayors for those cities are also being paid for sitting on the regional council and that the committee’s comparison didn’t reflect that they were often receiving in excess of $200,000.
Davis said that while he won’t be running for a third term, it was important to make sure that the future Mayor would be compensated fairly, especially because the role has changed over the last several decades.
“When I was an elected official back in the 1980s, back then, it was a different situation. It was really a volunteer concept and there was some honour and respect in serving in public office that’s gone totally by the wayside,” said Davis. “As an elected official, it’s unbelievable the amount of abuse, harassment, coercion that you’re exposed to. … The days of people volunteering for this sort of thing are gone, and if you want good, qualified people to run for elected office, I suggest you compensate them accordingly.”
While Sicoli eventually tried to pass an amendment that would have the committee take another look at the review, it ultimately failed and the vote to receive the previously amended report and recommendation was carried.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
