Coun. Alex Reed has set his sights on improving council transparency saying he intends to bring a motion forward at the next town meeting that if passed would compel administration to release staff salaries to the public.
The provincial threshold for salary disclosure is $107,000, but the town has the power to adjust that number if it wishes and some councillors believe all staff salaries should be disclosed.
Coun. Tara McFadden compared the disclosure to reporting councillors wages, however the two issues are very dissimilar. Elected officials choose to put themselves into the spotlight when they run for election. That means their pay, volunteer activities, political opinions and associations fall under scrutiny. That higher level of attention is part of the job and is part of the deal when they sought votes from the public, but that isn’t the case for town staff, at least not all of them.
We do agree that some of the higher level management salaries should be disclosed in an effort to ensure the town is spending wisely, but a break down of salary by position across the board, as some councillors have suggested, poses significant problems.
The most obvious issue is that of privacy. While Coun. Morgan Nagel suggests the name would omit the names of employees, in a town this size that does not guarantee anonymity. The staff pool at the Town of Cochrane is not like the City of Calgary that employs more than a thousand people. Cochrane has 330 employees, more than 100 of them are seasonal, casual or temporary, which means it would not be difficult to associate specific people to job titles.
Those 330 jobs equate to annual expenses of $21.6 million – 41 per cent of the budget – which works out to an average salary of $65,000 per year. While that is well above the provincial average of $48,800, many will fall below that threshold considering the chief financial officer earned $245,000 in 2015 while the designated officer made $103,000 – those are currently the two staff salaries, council is required to disclose.
When council debates this motion, it should give careful thought to which other salaries have public value. Does it matter how much the grasscutters make and does the public have the right to know?
Coun. Reed’s suggestion that Cochrane should have a sunshine list to improve transparency is a good one, but we must keep in mind that this is a small community and preventing the list from becoming predatory will not be as simple as redacting names.
