Man I wish I wrote this piece.

On the front page of today’s Kelowna Daily Courier, reporter Ron Seymour has a brilliant piece looking at high-priced managers in Kelowna City Hall. Seymour reports a fascinating stat: “According to Statistics Canada, wages for the 120,000 British Columbians people employed in ‘management occupations’ in B.C. actually fell 2.4 per cent last year.” Not at city halls, however.

Read his whole piece here. My favorite chunk:

And those at the very top just keep going higher.

I think comparisons over two years are fair at the management level, because of the way salary increases tend to go inside city halls. Typically, a manager reaches a certain level and plateaus for a bit, until an outside consultant is brought in to review his or her salary, workload and responsibilities with people doing comparable work in other municipalities.

It will surprise exactly no one to learn that that — egad! — the review usually finds that the manager in question is underpaid relative to some other bureaucrat in some other city. The argument is made by city officials, if the question is even ever put to them, that they have to pay their staff competitive salaries or they’ll take their brains and run off somewhere else.

I had The Daily Courier’s summer practicum worker pick 10 city managers’ names at random. Then I looked at how much they were paid in 2012, compared to last year. The first thing that struck me is that all 10 of them were still employed by the city. None had moved off to greener pastures, because perhaps there aren’t many greener than Kelowna’s.

The randomly chosen managers’ salaries in 2012 ranged from $86,422 to $188,800. Over the next two years, their total pay increase ranged from a low of 2.7 per cent to 7.7 per cent. It averaged 4.5 per cent.

That’s not just a rate of increase that outstrips the pay raise enjoyed by most other British Columbians, but also contrary to what’s been happening specifically to management salaries.

According to Statistics Canada, wages for the 120,000 British Columbians people employed in “management occupations” in B.C. actually fell 2.4 per cent last year.

I hope the next time the outside consultant reviews city managers’ salaries at City Hall, some account is made of that statistic. But I wouldn’t count on it.