The Squamish-Lillooet Regional District board has increased annual pay, in part, as a way to simplify how director pay is calculated.
On the surface, it looks dramatic at $25,000 for electoral area directors, compared with the current stipend at roughly half that amount.
However, the board is changing the way directors are funded, removing a formula seen as convoluted and complicated that adds pay based on meetings attended for the rural area directors.
“No two regional districts are the same,” said Area D director Tony Rainbow. “They have a variety of ways of dealing with this.”
From now on, the electoral area directors will go to a flat rate of $25,000 plus travel costs. This will replace the current system in which the directors earn a stipend and travel costs plus a fee for meetings they attend, with differences within the SLRD among the directors based on a formula that includes factors such as meeting and travel time.
“Different directors over the years had made an application to have a certain type of meeting included… to be paid for certain types of meetings,” Rainbow said. “What it meant was every time you went to a meeting, if you wanted to get paid for it, you then had to ask the board to approve that.”
Beyond the regular and special board meetings, the directors attend their own meetings, as well as other committee meetings, hearing, conferences and other functions.
“For board meetings and board committee meetings, it was fairly straightforward,” he said. “Over the years, there had been other meetings that had been sanctioned.”
Rainbow said the new stipend of $25,000 will replace amounts of roughly $23,000 to $26,000 paid to each director based on the stipend in addition to the meeting fee.
What the board has acknowledged with the new formula, Rainbow said, is that all the directors have to go to a variety of meetings in their area as well as at the board level. At the same time, meetings represent only part of the job of director.
“You can actually be doing quite a lot of work without attending as many meetings,” he said.
Rainbow also said the board has considered the issue of incentives for ensuring attendance at meetings.
“We’ve obviously got some provisions in there [that] if you miss a certain number of meetings, you’re accountable for that,” he said. “You stop getting paid and then you have to explain what the heck you’ve been doing.”
The bylaw includes reference to an amendment that states this will happen if a director misses three consecutive meetings.
Part of the reason for the change is to simplify the process for staff as well as electoral area directors.
“The other thing it does is it saves some time,” he said. “It’s much simpler.”
The SLRD has also simplified the payment process for members of board who are also elected members of the municipal governments, again rolling in the meeting fee with the stipend for a total of $12,500.
Once again, the amount represents a standardized amount, along with an increase for some members and a decrease for others, based on estimates for 2016 in an SLRD document from September.
