Quesnel City Council will decide in the fall whether or not give the next Council a big pay raise.
It would be to offset a change in taxation by the Federal Government to no longer allow them to get 1/3rd of their annual remuneration tax free.
Mayor Bob Simpson…
“We’ve chosen just to watch, quite frankly let other people do the work to figure out what some of the options are, rather than have our staff do it, because every municipality and regional district is dealing with this and our staff are simply going to roll up all of the lessons learned, the different ways communities are dealing with it, and put that out in front of Council in September.”
Simpson says his preference would be to make the decision for the next Council so they aren’t in the awkward position of giving themselves a raise…
“I have always maintained that Councils or MLA’s or whoever shouldn’t actually shouldn’t do any pay or remuneration changes within a term. They should do the work and if they think there needs to be substantive change, then they should do it for the next Council coming in, so there is an election in between. ”
He says there has been no discussion on Council that they deserve to be paid more but he does say that without a raise, you would be asking people to come in and so the same work for less pay.
The City of Prince George just gave themselves a raise to cover the tax change.
The Mayor there now makes just under 128 thousand dollars a year and Councillors get a little more than 37 thousand.
By comparison Quesnel’s Mayor gets $44,302 and Councillors get just $15,200 each.
The Cariboo Regional District, meanwhile, is currently dong an assessment and looking at three different options.