City defends ‘out of control’ salaries

Salaries paid to senior managers at the city of Montreal and the city’s transit authority are "out of control," with some executives pocketing raises and bonuses totalling up to 12 per cent when the average pay increase for city employees is two per cent, Projet Montreal city councillors charged Wednesday.

But the head of human resources at city hall says Montreal does not give bonuses to its managers and the opposition party has misinterpreted how bureaucrats are awarded pay raises. Meanwhile, the vice-chairperson of the Societe de transport de Montreal says the transit authority’s pay scales are comparable with similar organizations and warned Projet Montreal "not to alarm the public with a right-wing discourse that can only harm public transit."

The controversy follows the publication by Projet Montreal of the salaries and raises of 50 senior Montreal managers, as well as a list of the 20 best-paid executives working for the city and the STM. Thirteen of those 20 spots are filled by STM managers.

The best-paid of all those on the list is STM general manager Yves Devin, whose eight-per-cent raise allowed him to make $313,188 in 2010, more than twice the salary paid to Mayor Gerald Tremblay.

The best-paid bureaucrat at city hall and No. 2 on Projet Montreal’s Top 20 is city manager Louis Roquet, who pulled in $300,000 in 2010, his first year back at city hall after working in the private sector.

For Projet Montreal leader Richard Bergeron, the raises given to senior management at city hall ranged from a guaranteed 6.5 per cent a year to 12 per cent in the event of a positive performance review.

But he saved his most scathing criticism for the STM.

"There’s something that’s been going on at the STM for the past couple of years that’s even more scandalous than what’s happening at the city of Montreal," he said. "In the top 20 of the highest salaries, 13 are at the STM.

"We keep saying there are too many managers at the city of Montreal, but at the STM, they’ve gone from 37 to 41."

However Jean-Yves Hinse, head of human resources at city hall, said Bergeron had misinterpreted how managers get pay hikes, noting that while all managers – like all other city employees -received an annual cost-of-living increase of about two per cent, any further raise was based on job performance for that year.

"In some rare instances, the raise can be 10 per cent," Hinse told reporters. "But in some cases it can be zero and in some cases, managers have left because their performance wasn’t up to standard."

Hinse also wondered why Bergeron was so scandalized by the city’s salary system for its managers, since that system was put into place while Bergeron was on the city’s executive committee.

STM vice-chairperson and city councillor Marvin Rotrand said the transit authority had recently been honoured as the best in North America and was "neither fat nor overpaid."

"I can guarantee that any of our directors could leave tomorrow and earn a lot more money in the private sector," he said, adding that over the past few years STM managers had overseen a growth in service and an ongoing program to renew the bus and metro systems.

Rotrand said salaries paid to STM managers were comparable with those paid at the Toronto Transit Commission and other North American transit authorities. And a comparison of Devin’s salary with that of TTC chief general manager Gary Webster seems to bear that out.

While Webster’s salary for 2010 has not been made public, he earned $280,037 in 2009, while Devin was paid $289,989 for the same year.

Rotrand also cautioned about getting too worked up over the percentage of a raise paid to an STM employee.

"Some of the people who have had what appears to be a 12.9-per-cent increase have suddenly been given control of almost $11.5 billion in capital spending," he said. "And our engineers are overseeing … dossiers where, if we went to the private sector to accompany us as consultants, the cost would be three to four times higher."

Projet Montreal is calling upon the Tremblay administration to ensure senior managers’ pay raises do not exceed the percentage of any other city employee, to use the pay scales in other Quebec municipalities as a reference when paying senior managers and to reduce the ratio of managers to employees to 1-to-14 from the present 1-to-10.

City hall has already announced it intends to reduce the ratio to 1-to-13.