Kelowna council pay review proposed

By Ron Seymour Kelowna Daily Courier

Kelowna Mayor Sharon Shepherd doesn‘t particularly think she needs a raise – but three other people might think so. Shepherd will propose at Monday‘s council meeting that an independent committee be struck to consider whether pay for the mayor‘s position and the eight councillors should be increased after November‘s municipal election. Such a review is routinely done once during each three-year council term. “I‘m not pushing for a raise,” Shepherd said Saturday, “but I am concerned about councillors‘ salaries. This is a growing city, and there‘s a lot of work to do.” Shepherd earned $82,825 in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available. One-third of the salary was tax-free, which is standard practice in most municipalities. The eight councillors each earned about $25,334, with one-third of that again being tax-free. Pay for the mayoral position increased 15 per cent in the five years before 2006, and councillor salaries rose 23 per cent in the same period. Shepherd will ask her council colleagues for the names of people who may be interested in serving on the salary review committee. She will then decide who to appoint. “I‘d like to get people from a variety of backgrounds – business, social agencies, maybe someone from a youth perspective,” she said. Committee members would be tasked with comparing the salaries and workload of Kelowna municipal politicians with those in other cities of similar size. Any recommendations for changing the salary would then be voted on by council, but the increases would not take effect until after the mid-November civic election. “Then people who might be interested in running for office would know what they‘d be getting into,” Shepherd said. Shepherd, who has been in municipal politics since 1996, said she believes community service, not money, is the main motivating factor for people who seek local office. “When I first ran for council, I didn‘t even know how much I was going to earn as a councillor,” the mayor said.