Mayor explains salaries

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This article was published 25/01/2012 (5031 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon Mayor Shari Decter Hirst attempted to answer critics of the proposed $76.7-million operating budget Tuesday morning by laying out why $6.4 million was added to salary expenses.

For the first time, $6.4 million was broken down after a line-item review of the salaries portion of the budget into the following categories: $1.2 million for changes in estimates, $1 million for new positions, $1 million for collective agreement increases, $910,000 for changes in roles, people or allocations, $700,000 for increased casual labour, $600,000 for a pay administration review, $530,000 for step change (incremental pay) increases and $430,000 for changes in estimates.

An additional $600,000 went to pay adjustments eight years overdue for non-union and administrative staff, Decter Hirst said. Without that expense, some subordinates, hired and paid at market rates, were making more than their superiors, who were not paid similar wages to those paid by other cities or in the private sector.

Decter Hirst said city administration had been aware of the issue since 2005 and was attempting to make up the salary differences using a rolling average of salaries paid in comparable cities.

That didn’t work, and that forced city officials to retroactively increase salaries a median of 12 per cent to 67 non-union employees just to get them to the 50th percentile of nine comparable cities in Western Canada and the Manitoba provincial government. City manager Scott Hildebrand said these are not bonuses, and that no bonuses were ever paid to non-unionized staff.

“We are putting ourselves in the same box other councils have put themselves in, when they let anxiety around a property tax increase drive decision making,” Decter Hirst said.

“Don’t I wish another decision had been made. If we had gone with a regular slope of property tax increases and budget increases that matched a growing community, we wouldn’t have the dramatic increase we have this year.”

Decter Hirst was asked whether the budget was attempting to resolve too many issues at once, and whether some spending priorities should wait.

“The challenge is when do we ever have the right time?” Decter Hirst said. “I can sympathize with previous councils and administrations for trying to postpone making these decisions. The dilemma is that if you keep putting this off, it catches up with you.”

The $530,000 for step changes covered the costs of promoting existing staff or mandatory pay raises for years of service. Decter Hirst said the high number of city staff expected to retire within three years will mean those positions will likely be filled by people in lower pay grades in the future.

Another contentious issue in the proposed budget involves filling new positions the budget’s critics say the city can’t afford.

Incorporated in the $1 million for new positions were eight new clerical employees for the Brandon Police Service, mandated by an arbitration decision. This was to shift paperwork duties from police officers to clerical staff.

The remaining $570,000 covers the hiring of a new policy analyst, director of communications, financial analyst, deputy human resources director, a community planner, a building inspector, and a half-time payroll position for the Brandon Fire and Emergency Services.

Decter Hirst said those positions are required now in order for the city to plan for its current and future infrastructure needs.

“Frankly, we are going to have infrastructure in that 2013 budget and how do we pay for that?” Decter Hirst said. “We could be looking at debentures and those kinds of things because we need to start moving on that file. And we are, starting at the very front end with planning and gathering information.”

Decter Hirst said some of the salary increases are negotiated through collective agreements, and that contracts involving emergency services such as police, firefighter-paramedics and those working in the E-911 call centre are settled through arbitration processes that use a five-city average in wages if disputes can’t be resolved themselves.

“We have faced a lot of criticism about the cities we do compare against, and we felt these are the ones that the police and fire departments use,” Hildebrand said.

“For the most part, the cities are relatively the same size and even if you took Lethbridge out, Brandon for 2011 are roughly at the 50 percentile in that average.”

This year, four collective agreements expired in the same year, and the city, “paid a price for that,” Decter Hirst said.

The loss of experienced city staff also affected the preparation of this year’s budget process.

Decter Hirst said the city treasurer, city manager and other key staff were drafting their first city budget and some expenses fell through the cracks.

For example, $250,000 in police salaries were underestimated. Another $200,000 had to cover increases to the Workers Compensation Board rates. The flood of 2011 led to under-budgeting in some salary areas, or some labour costs were misallocated to another budget line item. An increase of the internal charge out rates at the city garage led to another $200,000 alteration to the budget estimates. Other employer-paid benefits cost the city $50,000.

While new accounting software is intended to allow department heads a better way to track expenses going forward, it doesn’t erase the need to pay present costs.

Decter Hirst said she takes responsibility for the way the budget was released and pledged a better response in 2013.

“I think we underestimated the disengagement of the community,” Decter Hirst said. “We had all of these town halls and nobody came. We thought it was because people understood what we were talking about. That was a huge mistake.”

The media conference was attended by three city councillors — Corey Roberts (Rosser), Shawn Berry (Linden Lanes) and Jeff Fawcett (Assiniboine), who sat in as observers while other city managers and Decter Hirst explained their salary strategy.

» kborkowsky@brandonsun.com