Ottawa Business Journal
Published: Monday, June 8, 2009

Councillors make enough dough

Jeff Polowin's article (Media glare, lack of salary keeps heat on councillors) in last week's OBJ touched on some important realities of city hall. But his idea to change councillors' compensation to make civic government work better is a simplistic solution to a complex problem.

He is employing the old adage that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Ergo, better pay attracts better candidates for council. But pay is not the main issue: questions of governance, focus, the role of the councillor and lag between policy discussion, program implementation and public results are the real issues.

To be fair, Mr. Polowin possesses a wealth of outside knowledge about local government and knows what approaches and policies yield success. And his point that seven out of 10 people don't vote municipally, and really have no right to complain, is bang-on.

Ditto for his point about the incessant local media focus that magnifies the inherent pettiness between some councillors, which diminishes council as a whole. Candid conversations with several members of council buttress this assertion. As some long-time staff astutely note, they are who they are.

Presently, a councillor's salary is just under $95,000 and is pegged at 55 per cent of the mayor's yearly pay. It is a comfortable wage and fully taxable. But it in no way reflects the 60- to 70-hour work weeks most councillors put in.

On the other hand, for the majority of council it's the most money they've ever made given their backgrounds, which range from careers in teaching, community work, mid-level management in the federal government, broadcasting, small business or a lifetime in politics. This is not a pejorative observation but rather a simple fact, given average pay grids for these professions.

Changing your councillor's take-home pay is not the answer. Changing their environment and culture is.

To start, governance – the exercise of authority and management – must change. On too many issues, staff has become the government (usually responding to political direction) and council acts as the official opposition. Manageable tension between politicians and staff is healthy, but acrimony and dysfunction is not.

And this ties directly to issue focus. Council should be setting outcomes, if not relentlessly driving big-ticket items such as economic diversification, land use planning, wastewater and environmental management, our transportation footprint, youth engagement and public safety.

Yes, council has partly tackled the transportation issue – just the small issue of who pays for what remains – and the recent Official Plan debate, although hijacked by an unrealistic and untenable anti-growth focus, was instructive.

But on other fronts, the trivial crowds out the substantive for hours (even meetings) on end.

Consider stickers on emergency vehicles, or prohibiting legitimate tradeshows on city property, banning bottled water in city facilities, questioning the motives of council colleagues – the list goes on.

The job title is city councillor, not ward councillor. Yet micro-managing minutiae, at which some councillors excel, makes them more akin to be 1930s politicos in Chicago or Boston. Changing how councillors get elected – perhaps two per federal riding – plus a mayor to make 15 around the council table could change this.

Finally, there's the incrementalism from policy debate to the decision to actual implementation of key initiatives. Take the decade-long saga to build our new convention centre. Some of these issues are a function of money and getting other governments to sign on, but at some point decisions need to be made, stuck to and leadership must prevail to make things happen.

As for our current crop of councillors, I agree that public life is not easy and too often their service is not acknowledged. But they also run of their own free will and elected public service should never be a career in and of itself.

Elected politics works best with a churn of women and men of all ages, from all walks of life, giving a decade or so in office then moving on to make way for new ideas, fresh energy and the next generation of leadership.

The issue of improving city hall is far more complex than fixing the pay scale for councillors. Only by fixing how council makes decisions, what issues it tackles and accelerating its capacity to spawn infrastructure and impactful programs will we attract accomplished leaders to stand for election.

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Walter Robinson is a principal with Tactix Government Consulting. He is a former federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former chief of staff to the mayor of Ottawa.