Tax benefit clawback reason for council pay increase recommendation
A report to Windsor city council is recommending a council pay increase in order to compensate for council members no longer receiving a third of their pay tax-free in 2019.
The Council Compensation Review Committee recommends a $29,387 increase in gross pay for the mayor and a $6,100 increase for councillors.
With the proposed pay increase and accounting for the disappearance of the tax-free allowance, the take-home pay for councillors would stay the same, while the mayor would earn $7,055 less.
Council will be voting on the issue Monday night.
To make those recommendations, the committee looked at nine municipalities similar in size to Windsor.
"The wages for those councillors were on par with the wages that were recommended by our group," said Toni Scislowski, chair of the committee.
According to the report, the pay for council has not seen an increase since 2005. It recommends a compensation review every four years, in the middle of each council term.
Should council be a full-time job?
The committee interviewed councillors to find out how much work they put in per week, into what's supposed to be a part-time job. The answer was roughly 40 hours.
After doing the math, on average, councillors make $16 an hour.
Shawn Micallef, a newspaper columnist and university teacher who grew up in Windsor-Essex, said there are councillors who are effectively "working full-time hours for part-time pay."
"The amount of time a councillor can spend on issues is radically reduced when they have to make a living doing something else," he said.
He thinks councillors should become full-time positions because not everyone has the ability to afford holding down a full-time job, while working irregular hours as a city councillor.
Outgoing Coun. Bill Marra has a different take.
"If you get into this business for the compensation, then you're getting into it for the wrong reasons," he said.
However, he said councillors put in "a significant amount of hours" and compensation should reflect that and be reviewed regularly.
Rather than making it a full-time position, Marra suggests increasing the number of council assistants to support councillors, and decreasing the number of committees they have to sit on.
In place of councillors, he supports having more residents on committees, which he believes would yield a greater outcome.
"The workload has gone up," said Marra, who started as a councillor in the 90s.
"The demands on an elected official has easily tripled — if not quadrupled."
