Call the WAAAAAAAH-mbulance!

Kamloops City Councillor Nancy Bepple feels local politicians aren’t being paid enough, and has brought forward a notice of motion to ask Kamloops staff to report back with some options.

The Kamloops Daily News has a good piece outlining her concerns:

Bepple, who works at Thompson Rivers University, said after the meeting that she must take a leave when she goes to daytime events as a City representative. That includes committee meetings, or sessions of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, where she sits as a B.C. representative.

I am fairly certain no one put a gun to Ms. Bepple’s head and forced her to run for office. They certainly didn’t force her to sit on the FCM. If she’s worried about her time – manage it better. Of course, she probably enjoys the free trips the FCM offers.

She said she took the working hours that another councillor tracked and did the math and showed they earn about $10 an hour.

Bepple said she puts in 20 to 30 hours a week as a councillor. She has to buy back benefits from TRU to compensate for her missing work hours.

As of Jan. 1, the mayor gets paid $74,434 and councillors get $24,811. One-third of those amounts is tax free.

Mayor and council get annual increases tied to the Vancouver Consumer Price Index. The CPI for 2013 was 0.5 per cent.

Um, talk about bad math. If you believe her claim that she works 20 to 30 hours every single week (I don’t – I was a township councillor for six years in Langley, a community with 100,000 people, and the time commitment here wasn’t close to that. Some weeks maybe, but then there are the weeks with relatively little), her salary works out to $19/hour for 25 hours of work a week. To get to her mythical $10/hour claim, she would have to work 47.7 hours a week, very single week.

Let me give you the biggest reason not to increase Kamloops’ politician pay: they raised property taxes 3.55 per cent this year. Kamloops councillors should pay more attention to controlling costs – not raising them.