Brampton mayor blasts senior staff over wage increase

Linda Jeffrey says top level staff ignored council directive to cut salaries.

Thestar.com
March 25, 2015
By San Grewal

Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey tore into senior staff Wednesday morning for ignoring council's directive to reduce their wages, and for presenting budget information at the last minute, preventing councillors from making informed decisions.

“I hate it when my colleagues and I are not given adequate time,” Jeffrey told the city's interim chief administrative officer John Corbett, her voice rising with anger inside the council chamber where the budget sub-committee meeting was held.

Staff had presented two scenarios for the 2015 budget, one resulting in a 6.59 per cent increase to the city's share of the tax bill, the other recommending a 4 per cent increase.

“I can't believe this is the first time I am seeing these scenarios,” Jeffrey said, her arms raised to her side. “To me, the fact that these documents have been dumped on our desks this morning is unacceptable.”

Corbett first suggested that the budget documents were ready two weeks ago for a meeting that was cancelled, but then said staff got the material at the same time as council.

“I can't tell you how disappointed I am, that everything in the agenda was given to us this morning. Did this just come together last night?” Jeffrey said. “I just got this package 15 minutes ago.”

Jeffrey, who was elected in October and immediately lowered her salary by about $50,000, again lost her cool with senior staff, singling out Corbett and Treasurer Peter Honeyborne, after a report was presented recommending that wages of non-union staff not be frozen, despite council direction to do so and a scathing independent report in January that found 94 per cent of increased tax revenues over the last decade were used to fund a ballooning staff payroll.

“We've got a lot of people (in Brampton) that work two and three jobs to bring home the bacon,” Jeffrey told the Star after the meeting. “We have a lot of residents struggling to make their car payments and mortgages and they don't see any of that pain being shared at the City of Brampton.”

She said staff had been told to come to council with a recommendation for a non-union wage freeze. During the meeting, councillors echoed the mayor’s anger describing the city’s management and executive staff as high paid, pointing to numerous staff redundancies, and arguing some staff are paid more than they should be for the jobs they are doing.

“What we essentially got today was a report saying, 'No, we're good. Everything is fine. It comes across as a sense of entitlement,” Jeffrey said. “When I was an MPP, provincial legislators imposed a wage freeze on ourselves for seven years.”

Corbett, who made $209,196 in 2011 as a commissioner and $283,779 in 2013 as the CAO, responded during the meeting, saying staff morale would drop and it would be hard to compete for talent with a wage freeze in place. He instead offered an alternative that he presented to council, to decrease the number of non-union staff by 12 per cent by 2017. The plan was not included in the report to council.

Earlier, when senior staff presented their first scenario for the city's proposed 2015 budget, it recommended that 179 new unionized and non-union staff be hired. For 2015, that would increase staffing costs by $4,874,000.

Jeffrey again sounded incredulous after asking staff if the requested senior staff wage freeze was incorporated into the budget scenarios. Honeyborne said: “The cut is not in either of the scenarios.”

Jeffrey fired back: “It still hasn't been included in the budget, is that what you're telling me?”

Council questioned how Corbett came up with the 12 per cent figure for non-union staff reductions by 2017.

“That is a high level estimate, quite frankly, based on my own observations,” he said.

Jeffrey expressed surprise that Corbett would use “observations” instead of any research or analysis to make his argument against a wage freeze.

Council, in the end, ignored the report signed by Corbett and his executive leadership team, and instead called for the wage freeze they had directed staff to recommend.

“I expect the executive leadership team and Mr. Corbett to do a better job in providing us with data and facts to back up the recommendations that they make,” Jeffrey said, after she and her council colleagues pressed forward with the wage freeze. “What we saw today was not provided in advance, it didn't give council enough time to evaluate it. I don't know if they were withholding the information or whether it wasn't ready, but it's not acceptable.”