The Town of Gibsons has ratified a new collective agreement with unionized staff, and councillors have also approved a significant raise for the Town’s top administrator.
The five-year agreement with the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) Local 1703 includes an 8.75 per cent wage hike over the course of the deal, which is retroactive to Jan. 1.
At a closed-door meeting last week, council (excluding councillors Silas White and Stanford Lumley, who did not attend) voted to give chief administrative officer Emanuel Machado a 10 per cent salary bump, also retroactive to Jan. 1. According to the Town’s Statement of Financial Information, Machado was paid $123,384 in 2016.
The increase will boost his salary to over $135,000.
In a release announcing the new agreement with the BCGEU, Mayor Wayne Rowe said,
“We are very pleased to have this new contract in place. It reflects what our citizens can afford and at the same time recognizes the value of our employees with wage and benefit increases.”
Rowe told Coast Reporter he’d say the same about Machado’s pay raise, which was his first, other than standard cost-of-living increases, in five years.
“The Town’s policy is to review senior staff salaries every five years,” said Rowe. “We hired a consultant to look at comparable communities and determined that our CAO was seriously underpaid ... and even with this boost, quite frankly, he’s still below a number of other communities’ [CAOs]. We thought it was the most that we could afford to do in this first review in the time he’s been with us.”
Rowe also said that with a lot of municipalities in B.C., and across the country, recruiting new top management, council also had its eye on the need for stability in the executive team. “There’s very serious competition throughout the province for qualified administrative staff, and chief administrative officers, so for us to be able to attract and retain good, qualified people, we have to be prepared to pay a salary that’s going to be reasonable.”
