The City of Lethbridge underwent its budget deliberations last week, with committee members unanimously voting to take a 10 per cent salary cut in 2021, while also freezing it the next year.
If the budget is approved, which is expected to happen on Dec. 15, this would mean the full-time mayoral position and eight part-time councillors would take a pay cut until at least the end of 2022.
City of Lethbridge salaries are made public and currently, the mayor has a salary of $140,542. By calculating a 10 per cent cut, this would drop to approximately $126,488.
Councillors would be making $51,821 as opposed to $57.579 — a reduction of around $5,700 for the year.
Councillor Rob Miyashiro, who says he is one of two councillors who has a full-time job outside of the city, believes the decision to drop their earnings will save money in an area that doesn’t impact public services.
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“Even if any council member was opposed to that, and they wanted to reduce that percentage, they would be seen to be self-serving,” he said.
According to the City of Medicine Hat, the mayor’s salary is currently $135,152, while councillors make $44,981.
In Red Deer, the 2020 and 2021 salary for the mayor’s position is $125,574, while councillors there are the highest paid out of the three cities, at $66,360.
For the second year in a row, the city also recommended the cancellation of the annual municipal census. The yearly data-gathering exercise has been conducted annually since 2005, when Lethbridge had a population of 77,202 people.
City council voted to cancel the 2020 census due to changes at the provincial level. In the provincial government’s 2019 budget, it was announced that municipal census data will no longer be used to calculate annual provincial and federal grant funding, which was a major factor in conducting the census.
Miyashiro says in considering the 2021 census during budget deliberations, much of the same factors were taken into consideration. By cancelling the census for two consecutive years, savings will be upwards of $300,000 in taxation.
Keeping in mind the upcoming federal censusis scheduled to take place in May, Miyashiro says there would be no need to conduct one municipally.
“There’s no point in us doing one right away. One, because of the provincial government direction. Two, because of another national census coming up,” he said.
“That gives us a whole bunch of other data that different levels of government can use to plan different things.”
Miyashiro says none of these changes is yet official, as the budget is up for approval on Dec. 15.
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