Most of the city council candidates at Tuesday night's all-candidates forum, hosted by The Citizen, the Prince George Chamber of Commerce, the B.C. Northern Real Estate Board and UNBC, were asked in several different ways how they would change the city's overtime policy for senior managers.
With the mayoral candidates going first before those seeking to become city councillors and with Willy Enns not in attendance, Lyn Hall, seeking his second term as mayor, was asked about the overtime policy right off the top.
The two-and-a-half page Exempt Employee Overtime procedure sets out overtime scenarios, guidelines and pay rates for all exempt city employees.
The exceptions are the city manager, general managers and directors (that would be the nine-member city hall management team), the fire chief and deputy fire chief.
For them, the only additional compensation they're entitled for any extra hours is two additional weeks of vacation time per year.
The final paragraph states that all exempt employees, including the exceptions, working under the Provincial Emergency Program (which oversaw the Cariboo wildfires response) "are entitled to claim overtime for all hours worked outside of their regular working hours at two times their regular hourly rate."
Hall said he'd like to take a look at the policy in light of the concern expressed by city residents after it was revealed senior city staff were paid as much as $235 an hour in overtime during the 2017 Cariboo wildfire evacuation crisis.
He mentioned in passing that the policy was 20 years old and in need of review. A few minutes later, current city councillor Garth Frizzell repeated that the policy is 20 years old.
The exempt employee overtime procedure is actually far more recent than 20 years.
It was approved by city manager Kathleen Soltis on March 11, 2015, shortly after Hall became mayor. It was this document city communications staff provided when asked by The Citizen to provide the written policy justifying the payment of overtime to senior managers and directors in 2017. In addition, in a letter to The Citizen published in August signed by Hall, Frizzell and the rest of council, the same document was cited as the guiding policy for overtime for senior staff.
The policy might be based on a 20-year-old document but that's irrelevant. It was updated in 2015 and was enforced in 2017. Furthermore, in reply to a request for information from The Citizen about whether senior staff were paid overtime to manage the 2018 wildfire evacuation and, if so, how much, the city replied it wouldn't be able to provide that information until late this year or early next.
Incumbent city councillor Frank Everitt brushed away the question about there being more than 100 new city employees in 2017 over 2016. Although the 2017 Statement of Financial Information report provided to city council in June shows there were 1,071 city employees in 2017, up 116 from the 955 members of staff the year before, Everitt said the actual difference was 34 employees, without providing any information on where he got that number, which doesn't appear anywhere in the report.
There were, however, 34 more employees making more than $75,000 per year in 2017 than there were in 2016, rising from 289 to 323.
Everitt was also blunt about passing on to local taxpayers the $1.4 million cost to the City of Prince George to collect the provincial Employee Health Tax. It's simply impossible for the city to absorb such a large one-time expense without raising taxes, he argued.
It's not impossible, of course, to find less than one per cent from the city's annual budget in savings but it would require the kind of belt tightening households do all the time but the City of Prince George hasn't done in recent years.
As for the significant increase in the wages of senior city staff over the last four years, there could be a battle brewing between the incumbent city councillors. Most of the candidates and all of the incumbents were asked in several different ways about how they felt about those wages and whether they would review them if they won reelection.
Terri McConnachie provided the technically correct answer that city council only has one employee - the city manager - and does not directly manage anyone else, including senior staff. She used the analogy of a ship, where the city manager is the captain while city council instructs the captain on what direction to steer.
That was not enough for Brian Skakun, who said he would be pushing for more regular operational meetings with the city manager and more direct oversight. That is also technically correct because city council has the authority to manage its city manager as much or as little as it sees fit.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
