TNRD board room (Photo via TNRD/Facebook)
The Board Chair of the Thompson-Nicola Regional District is defending a decision to increase pay for directors by as much as 15 per cent in some cases.
Barbara Roden says the increase takes the pay for Electoral Area Directors to $30,206 while Municipal Directors will get an eight per cent increase to $17,000 a year on top of what they make at their respective municipality.
“$30,000 a year to be an EA Director, at minimum wage that would be about 30 hours a week,” Roden said on NL Newsday. “The EA Directors I know work more than 30 hours a week, and I think politicians probably should be paid more than minimum wage because I just of the old saying, ‘you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.'”
“We hear a lot about barriers to entering local politics and one of the biggest barriers were hear is that for the majority of local elected officials – we’re not talking the mayor of Vancouver or the mayor of Kamloops or big cities – we’re talking the majority which are small rural communities or Regional Districts what you make is not enough to support you.”
According to the TNRD, Electoral Area Directors were being paid $25,256 a year as of 2022, while Municipal Directors were getting paid $15,135. Roden, as Chair was being paid $23,766 on top of her earnings as the Mayor of Ashcroft, while Vice-Chair Robin Smith was getting $4,731 on top of her pay as Mayor of Logan Lake.
The TNRD Chair and Vice-Chair will now make $28, 394 and $5,739 respectively.
Breakdown of pay increases to TNRD Directors. (Photo via TNRD)
Roden says the pay increase is also meant to try and incentivize more women, people of colour, and young people to enter politics.
“They can’t hold down a full time job in addition to raising a family and being in local government so they have to make a choice,” Roden said. “I know lots of people – myself included over the years – in order to do some of the things I do in local government, I have to take unpaid time off.”
“So, as you say, you get a lot a lot of older people who are retired or you get business people who maybe own their own business, or they are in a position that they’re able to take time off.”
Roden says these pay increases will also mean the TNRD Directors are paid similar to their counterparts in other regional districts.
“When politicians sit down to talk about raising their stipends, no one is rubbing their hands together going ‘goody goody, we get to have this discission,'” she said. “We all hate it, it is awkward and the optics are crappy and no one likes doing it. The thing is no one has figured out a better system, so we’re kind of stuck with it.
The TNRD Board also voted to increase their pay for 2023 by four per cent, retroactive to Jan. 1, before deciding on the increases that take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.
“The current Board Remuneration Bylaw states that annual indemnities for 2023 be increased by an amount equal to [ British Columbia Consumer Price Index] for 2022, which is 6.9 per cent,” a report from Amanda Ellison, the TNRD’s General Manager of People and Engagement said. “There is both sentiment from the Board to follow the Bylaw as written and concern that this amount is too large.”
“In 2022, the Board did increase annual indemnities in alignment with BC CPI and in 2021 the Board decided to forgo any increase to indemnities. Given feedback received from the Board, staff is recommending that the Board of Directors approve an annual increase of 4 per cent to indemnities retroactive to Jan. 1, 2023.”
Three-year average of BC CPI. (Photo via TNRD)
Roden says the TNRD Board will continue to review the Consumer Price Index before deciding on any future increases to pay for the Board of Directors.
“We’ve linked it to the CPI, which of course has gone crazy over the last 12 to 18 months, and so we were looking at had we gone by that as a standing for 2023, that would have been a 6.9 per cent increase, and we went, ‘woah, that’s a lot,'” Roden said. “So what we’ve done is taken a rolling average of the last three years, which works out to four per cent.”
“And then going forward it will continue to be at the CPI and we will keep an eye on it and take a look at that rolling three year average to make sure that when things are very high or very low, it balances out somewhere in the middle.”
The increase in 2023 pay will cost the TNRD about $21,578, with money coming from its budget surplus, while the pay increase for 2024 will cost $65,258.
