BANFF – Banff’s next mayor and council will be getting a small pay hike after the October municipal election.
With Councillor Chip Olver the deciding vote, council voted 4-3 on Monday (June 14) to boost the wages based on the recommendations of an independent public council remuneration review committee.
Coun. Olver, who has indicated she will run again in the October election, said the mayor’s salary was six per cent below comparable municipalities while councillor wages were about 25 per cent below average.
She pointed to the committee’s rationale for a raise, which said a conservative increase was appropriate given financial restraints associated with the pandemic, with moderate increases later in the term to ensure Banff’s salaries don’t fall behind the average.
“The Town of Canmore was almost right on the average… and is almost $12,000 per year over a Town of Banff councillor,” said Coun. Olver, who has been on council for 27 years since winning a byelection in 1994.
The base salary for the full-time position of mayor will increase 1.4 per cent from $96,721 to $98,075 after the Oct. 18 election until the end of 2022, followed by a 2.5 per cent inflationary increase each year from 2023-25.
Moving from $31,249 to $32,692, the base remuneration for a councillor will be calculated at one-third of that of the mayor’s annual salary from 2021-25, reflecting the part-time nature of the job.
The committee recommendation, however, was not unanimous, with Connie MacDonald and Marilyn Bell supporting a salary increase and Hugh Pettigrew in opposition.
Banff’s council remuneration policy stipulates that a comprehensive salary and benefits review takes place every election year prior to the election, and that the review be conducted through a committee comprised of Banff residents.
As part of the independent review, the public committee reviewed the compensation packages of other comparable municipalities such as Canmore, Okotoks, Airdrie and Cochrane.
Mayor Karen Sorensen and councillors Corrie DiManno and Grant Canning joined Coun. Olver in supporting the wage increase, however councillors Brian Standish, Ted Christensen and Peter Poole were opposed.
Coun. Poole said he believes council should hold the line on wages for mayor and councillors given the devastating financial blow to the community falling out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Many, many members of our community, the businesses of Banff and elsewhere, have noticed that their take-home wage didn’t just stay the same, it fundamentally dropped over the last two years,” he said.
“We might well want to keep up with the Joneses and that is, for lots of reasons, an entirely rationale thing to do … but I think our approach is to fix our salary now and let in future years raises happen when we are not suffering through the economic problems of the pandemic.”
Part of the committee’s rationale for recommending a wage increase was to be “fair and equitable” and for salaries to “not be perceived as a barrier to those seeking to serve the public in the office of mayor or councillor.”
But Coun. Poole said the best way to attract new candidates at a smaller municipal level is for incumbents to step down.
“We know from lots of literature the advantage for incumbents over new challenges is so great that it’s a bigger hurdle for new challenges to get a seat on council, particularly when those incumbents are capable, hardworking incumbents like my fellow councillors,” said Coun. Poole, who has indicated he won’t be seeking a second term as a councillor. “The relative wage is not the barrier, the fundamental electoral politics of incumbency is the barrier.”
In voicing her support for the conservative pay raise, Mayor Sorensen said she wanted to respect the committee’s recommendations, noting the reason the committee was established in 2013 was so the existing mayor and council did not have to vote on their own wages.
“I understand some of us won’t be there next term and some of you will be there next term, but this debate is exactly why we put a public committee on this,” said Sorensen, who is bowing out of municipal politics after 18 years, including two-terms on council and three terms as mayor.
“I appreciate the public committee, they put work into this, and I think they did take into consideration the situation the community is currently in, but this for me is more out of respect for the committee’s work.”
So far heading into the Oct. 18 municipal election, Stavros Karlos is the only mayoral candidate to have filed nomination papers, and Mark Walker and Jessia Arsenio have filed nomination papers for a council seat.
