Once again the Advocate has reminded us how fortunate we are to have such a financially conscious city council.
The headline in the Advocate reads Expenses stay on budget and goes on to explain how our elected officials have been spending our tax dollars.
On the face of it, councillors have stayed within the guidelines of the budget set for them at the start of the fiscal year, but when one digs a little deeper, the article exposes what it’s really costing us to support the council in its present form.
Let’s look at the numbers: eight councillors at $51,616 each adds up to $412,928, plus the mayors’ salary at $86,684; now were up to half a million dollars.
On top of this, we have expense claims of nearly $60,000 and the mayor’s PR expense of $213,941, in all just over one-quarter of a million dollars.
In an earlier editorial, the reader was asked to take time to assess whether or not our present councillors are doing the job they were elected to do.
Well, I believe that question isn’t difficult to answer, when the cost of operating the council is looked at realistically. Are we getting a fair return on an investment of at least $773,553, which is the approximate tax revenue from about 300 houses in the city?
When looking at the effectiveness of an elected council, we have to remember that we have another level of expenses created by the administration, over which we as taxpayers have no control.
As a city, we hire a city manager to do the job at a very lucrative salary. He or she then turns around and hires assistants, department managers etc., to carry out the everyday tasks.
It seems to me that if we hire a professional city manager, why do we need, with all due respect, a group of amateurs, city council, to spend hours pretending to run the city.
Let’s face it, the city manager and his staff make most of the decisions and council, after much hand wringing and debate, mostly I believe for public consumption, rubber stamp his recommendations.
Maybe that’s the way it should be. We take advice from someone we pay very well to manage the city’s affairs and if they don’t perform, we find someone who can do it better.
So as to the question ‘are we getting value from our present council and have they done the job since elected?’
Let’s face it, if we keep doing things the way they have always been done, should we as taxpayers expect anything to change?
Recently the Advocate ran a story about a company wanting to put up a sign on Gaetz Avenue.
Once again they were turned down because the study on future development on Gaetz Avenue that was started in 2010, is still ongoing. This is one simple example of the incompetency of the system and when one sees the amount of tax money going to the people who say they make these decisions on behalf of taxpayers, there isn’t much question that we are getting severely short changed.
George Croome
Red Deer