A commentary by a Victoria resident.
Victoria Coun. Jeremy Caradonna is missing, and I trust not deliberately, an important component of the public outrage over the council’s decision to raise its compensation.
It is not (only) that pay was raised, but that it was raised by council for themselves, as opposed to for the next council.
Even with the best of intentions and rationale, lawmakers setting their own pay erodes the public trust in a public institution, and is a disservice in itself.
Preventing this from occurring is important enough that it was the purpose of one of the first 12 amendments to the United States constitution, introduced by James Madison in the First Congress.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the need for such a safeguard is that it was also the last of those amendment to become ratified — more than 200 years later, during the 102nd Congress and the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
I am sympathetic to the councillor’s position on salaries.
Without competitive pay, we limit our choices to those who are privileged and can deign to forgo it, those who have few marketable skills and no better prospects elsewhere, and the selfless George Baileys we romanticize about when we insist on low pay for public servants.
While such saints do occasionally become available to us as candidates, relying on them is no basis for a recruitment policy.
If we want managerial expertise and a range of life experiences on city council, we must make a role on it a serious option for a working person. Otherwise our choices will remain limited to the privileged and the prospectless.
All of these arguments can be made with greater credibility when they do not also result in raising one’s own pay.
In its fumbling of this, council has taken the wind out of the sails of an arguably sound policy with an unarguably unsound implementation.
The least it can do in order to atone for this and to save the subject from becoming a third rail for future councils is to put into place an independent and transparent mechanism for pay increases that takes it out of the realm of ad hoc politicking.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
