So, council paid Tim Dillon & Associates $9,000 to provide justification for giving themselves yet another pay raise?
A raise that is to include health benefits, a yearly allowance for attending community events and an annual conference allowance.
With all the council promises and decisions that have turned in black holes, sucking millions of dollars out of the city budget, infrastructure (e.g. Matsqui Pool) that is falling apart, the city mired in a financial quagmire, the need for water rationing, how could anyone, even Abbotsford’s council, possibly think a raise is either deserved or in order?
What’s next? A golden retirement plan like the ones provincial and federal politicians have gifted themselves?
If council has its way, raises will happen quietly, behind the closed doors of city hall, without any need to bother taxpayers with the knowledge that council has got yet another automatic yearly raise – unearned and undeserved.
So much for Mayor George Peary’s “Getting good value for money [for taxpayers] is our number one priority.”
I include council’s current salaries as well as the proposed salary raises and perks in stating that taxpayers are not getting value.
Not that I don’t consider the $9,000 paid to Tim Dillon & Associates a misuse of city funds.
It is just that $9,000 seems a fairly cheap price, perhaps even a bargain, when you contrast the outcome, the proposed nine per cent pay raise, with the nearly 50 per cent (44 per cent) pay raise council arrived at and gave themselves on their own three years ago.
If there was any relationship between ‘value for money’ and the wages paid to Abbotsford’s current council, taxpayers would be getting an extremely large refund of the wages city council has paid itself.
Instead council is going to give itself ongoing yearly salary increases, benefits and perks. Business as usual – council gets the mine and taxpayers get the shaft.
James Breckenridge
