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Opinion: SD43 trustees dodge vote on wage increase

Why no report from staff or debate on change to trustee pay like there was at city councils?
Trustee pay
Everyone wants more cash in their jeans, but politicians need to be more transparent about how much they are paid.

School boards don’t deliver the same outrage or draw the same attention that city councils do because they don’t raise taxes.

But that doesn’t mean we should sit quietly while Tri-City school trustees get a substantial pay increase.

School District 43 trustees are paid the average stipend of city councillors in Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody — which they serve — though not the much lower pay of village councillors in Anmore and Belcarra — which they also serve.

That they’re paid according to this patently unfair formula is due to a decision made by a previous board of education, not the province, and trustees could easily change this policy.

But who are we kidding? They won’t take money out of their own pockets.

One trustee, rookie Jennifer Blatherwick of Coquitlam, tried, asking her colleagues last month to add Anmore village councillors’ indemnity to the calculation, which would have cut their salaries by 16%.

Instead, with no vote or explanation, trustees saw their annual pay rise from $43,236 to $51,294 because local city councils had all voted to adjust their pay to accommodate the change in federal government policy that had, for many years, made one third of their pay tax free. With the tax change factored in, SD43 trustees’ pay raise is about 2%.

That may not sound like much but a 2% hike is one many workers, especially those on minimum wage, would like to see.

A further question: Are this raise and their pay justified?

Tri-City trustees say it is because they are responsible for a large district and a large budget.

But we think comparing trustee work with council work is ridiculous. Trustees have fewer public meetings where decisions are made than do their council counterparts, fewer committee meetings and don’t have to face the music when taxes rise, like cities do, because they are funded by the province. And just compare the size of the council agendas — sometimes in the hundreds of pages — and councillors’ required reading to those of the school board.

It would be more realistic for SD43 trustees to compare their jobs to those of their counterparts in Surrey and Vancouver, whose trustees make much less yet are responsible for considerably more schools, larger budgets and more students.

It’s also strange that Tri-City trustees didn’t at least ask for a report from staff, as councillors did, on the effects of the federal tax change. Instead, they were silent on this, preferring to rely on the policy of annual adjustments based on council salaries while their council counterparts had to justify their pay hike to voters — and take the heat — when they voted on the adjustment.

We think it’s disingenuous to appear to be disinterested in something that is in fact, important.

If trustees consider themselves equal to Port Moody, Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam councillors — let us be clear: they’re not — they should be equally accountable to the community. That means making decisions like this in public and taking the bouquets or brickbats as they fall.