By Don White.

Now that the question of Nanaimo city council remuneration is assigned to a special task force reporting back to Council in 2020, a clear understanding of council duties and responsibilities should be high on everyone’s agenda – task force, council members, and voters included.

While some of us may have this understanding, I have never spent much time thinking seriously about it. Others may be the same as I am. And not just voters. The current council, like councils in the past, appear as divided as I as to what their duties are. Or what they should be.

Councillor Thorpe, for one (and he’s not alone) frequently emphasizes the priority of routine housekeeping and infrastructure before other matters. Some like Councillor Bonner take a broader view including issues of health, homelessness, and reconciliation with First Nations.

Since taxpayers foot the bill for remunerating council, it’s more than appropriate for all of us to spend some time thinking about council’s functioning and what we see to be their top priorities. When I ask myself that question, the answer that pops up is: Responsibilities relegated to Nanaimo Council but to no one else within our city.

In broad strokes, I think of three specific areas. Nanaimo City Council’s duty to ensure the wishes of the electorate are taken into account when setting municipal policy and action; their being charged with defining and developing a voter compatible vision for the city’s future; and their responsibility to voters for ensuring the city moves towards that end in a timely manner.

Since council is the only body mandated to deal with these overreaching responsibilities, these duties arguably amount to council’s top priorities. And a corollary suggests that secondary priorities, for example, those related to housekeeping and infrastructure, should not interfere with duties that come first. The vision of the city we are building must be paramount.

Which rings an alarm because of the amount of time council spends preparing for deliberating, and deciding routine housekeeping issues. Has anyone sat through a Council meeting and not wondered about the hours dedicated to the tedious, endless processing of bureaucratic matters like property variances, nuisance designations, and traffic routing?

One explanation for the time spent on secondary issues may be that it is required by the BC Community Charter. If so, that has implications for remuneration. If council must spend time on secondary priorities, they may need 3/4 or full time positions to have sufficient time to attend also to their first priority: developing and ensuring the achievement of our city’s vision.

On the other hand, if council’s extensive involvement in infrastructure matters is not required by the Charter, they may be sacrificing vision to managing or micro-managing. Managing policy and vision implementation is not their job.

A city’s CAO is the individual with the necessary skill set hired to actualize our council’s goals. In Nanaimo, CAO Jake Rudolf has the responsibility for accomplishing this task by managing the resources, financial and staff, that council makes available. Consider him the city’s vision application project manager in chief.

If the CAO tells council that insufficient resources have been provided or exist to achieve the desired goal (whether the shortage is managers, staff, or finances), it is council’s responsibility to remedy the situation by choosing to authorize the hiring of additional staff/managers, make funds available, or revise the city’s vision and/or its timeline into one that is achievable.

It is not the role of council to do those jobs nor take up the slack, themselves – even if such contribution is well meant. Given the way our city’s managers and its finances were gutted under the previous administration, I confess to wondering if some instances of this are happening and are interfering with council’s ability to focus where they should be focussing.

So remuneration for council boils down first to a question about the amount of time and energy council needs to spend – weekly, monthly, annually – to develop a compelling, satisfying, and realizable vision for our city. And also to monitor continuing, successful movement of our community along a path towards that vision. In terms purely of first priorities, the current, full-time position of the mayor and half-time positions of councillors seem adequate for this.

However, if taxpayers and/or the Community Charter require council members take on more than just their first priority, greater remuneration may well be justified. If council is expected also to spend time on secondary matters, more hours may be needed. More hours spent should come with higher salaries, not merely increases tied to the cost of living.

However, voters need to be mindful of the conflicts. Unless time, salaries, and individual capabilities accommodate all duties, the demands of meeting secondary responsibilities may reduce council’s effectiveness in carrying out their first priority, guiding our city’s future. It should be of huge importance to everyone that this not happen.

When the Council Remuneration Task Force begins its deliberations, these are factors for all sides to keep in mind. The goal of the Task Force should not simply be to justify salaries and benefits, but, more importantly, to ensure our city gets the best outcomes for the monies spent. The same deliberations also apply to voters.

This is not a matter we can afford to ignore and/or leave up to others to decide. It is very much in our own interest. Ultimately, it is always voters and the public who pay the price.