Trail city council has voted to give itself a two per cent raise retroactive to Jan. 1.
But the split decision further demonstrated the divide on council, after Mayor Lisa Pasin proposed holding the line on any increase until the next council is elected in the fall.
“Considering the high legal costs over the last two years associated with council, having a decrease in our stipends for this year of $3,015 is a goodwill gesture to put towards the taxpayers of this community,” she said.
Councillors Sandy Santori and Paul Butler supported the motion, but councillors Robert Cacchioni, Carol Dobie, Eleanor Gattafoni Robinson, and Carol Jones voted against it and it was defeated.
A new motion was then passed to provide an increase matching what the city’s unionized staff receive. As a result, Pasin will get another $789 for a total of about $40,000 annually while councillors will each get $371 more, a total of about $19,000 each. The combined increase of $3,015 will bring total council remuneration to about $153,000.
The debate revived council’s recent internal problems, in which Cacchioni was found to have breached council’s code of conduct toward former administrator David Perehudoff and Pasin and Santori were subsequently found to have breached the code in their comments and actions toward Cacchioni in closed meetings.
“I had nothing to do with the legal costs as far as I’m concerned,” Cacchioni said. “The costs were there with David Perehudoff when Lisa decided to get the lawyers. The second set of legal costs, at any time during the whole process, Lisa or Sandy could have said ‘I think I’ve breached the code.’ We could have done it unofficially. It doesn’t have to be done formally.”
However, Pasin responded that was not true. She said that in Perehudoff’s case, an employee lodged a complaint against the City of Trail as his employer, naming Cacchioni. As a result, the city was obligated to investigate.
“I know there has been stuff on Facebook and rhetoric around this council table for the past year and a half that [I] decided to litigate,” she said. “[I] followed the code, followed the policy. As an employer we have the responsibility to litigate.”
Regarding the second matter against Pasin and Santori, she said the complainants — Cacchioni, Jones, Gattafoni Robinson and Dobie — requested the matter be referred to legal counsel and handled in the same way as the Perehudoff complaint.
“There wasn’t the opportunity to sit around the table and mediate this out,” she said.
Pasin said her motion around stipends was intended for council to “take some collective ownership” for the situation. “It wasn’t intended to take stabs at people and create blame and bring up bad blood in things we’re supposed to be moving [on] from,” she said.
Corporate administrator Michelle McIsaac noted that in 2019 council increased its pay by about 15 per cent to make up for a change that eliminated a tax exemption for about one-third of council income. Since then, council’s increase has matched what unionized employees receive, but council has also gone with the consumer price index in other years.