With budget season comes a look at effective spending and where the city can cut costs or save on expenses.
This is a paid position. The council positions are not volunteer. We pay for our councillors through the city budget.
According to city documents, all councillors make $9,598.92 annually for their four year terms. On top of that, “all members of City Council are paid additional remuneration in the amount of $146.11 per day for attending any business on behalf of the city, which is not part of the member’s regular duties.”
So with this money coming from taxpayers, what are we getting from city councillors?
First off I do not envy a mayor or city councillor and the work they put into running a city, especially those who take it on as a second job. Especially on days where they are away from family because of meetings or conventions.
This past SUMA conference all six councillors were given the opportunity to attend as much of the conference as they were able. According to City Manager Roy Hardy, it was the first conference for a lot of councillors across the province since the past civic election.
Because of this SUMA tailored a lot of presentations and discussions around new things councillors should know and provided councillors with valuable networking opportunities, says Hardy.
“These councillors have to develop a municipal network so it’s important that they, in particular the new ones, attend.”
These costs are normally budgeted for with the mayor and two councillors going through the conference budget.
With no representation at the 2017 Federation of Canadian Municipalities, these costs of sending additional councillors to the SUMA convention are still coming in under budget, says Hardy.
Whether this is money well spent depends on how you feel the city council is doing.
When it comes to the valuable information that councillors are gaining from these conventions at no extra cost to the city, I am glad so many councillors, especially the new ones, got the opportunity to go.
When priority based budgeting came into affect in Humboldt thanks to Center for Priority Based Budgeting and Jon Johnson and Chris Fabian, they were impressed to see a city with such low administration costs.
Considering how many organizations they have worked with around budgeting, they were able to see the comparisons of Humboldt’s administration with other centres in the United States.
Humboldt’s administration costs only account for seven per cent of their total budget.
Hardy says that is because the managers on staff are not just administrative management but actual working management.
“We figured we have a good administrative cost compared to their means because our managers, to a large extent, are hands on.”
That is the beauty of democracy, if we do not believe that they are doing a good job, we can tell them.
Considering everything that city councillors have to deal with on a daily basis, it is money well spent.
Do you agree or disagree? Do you think your tax dollars are well spent this way.
