So, council paid Tim Dillon & Associates $9,000 to provide justification for giving themselves (council) yet another pay raise? A raise that is to include health benefits, a yearly allowance for attending community events and an annual conference allowance?

With all the council promises and decisions that have turned in black holes sucking millions of dollars out of the city budget, infrastructure (e.g. Matsqui Pool) that is falling apart, the city mired in a financial quagmire, the need for water rationing (in one of the wettest years on record) in order to have water for the Fire Department to use…….how could anyone, even Abbotsford’s council, possibly think a raise is either deserved or in order?

What’s next? A golden retirement plan like the ones provincial and federal politicians have gifted themselves?

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of this pay raise proposal is to increase the mayor and city council’s wages every year – forever – without the politicians every having to face the taxpayers and publically vote to push their personal hands deeper into taxpayers pockets. If council has its way raises will happen quietly, behind the closed doors of City Hall, without any need to bother taxpayers with the knowledge that council has gotten yet another automatic yearly raise – unearned and undeserved or not.

So much for Mayor Peary’s “Getting good value for money [for taxpayers] is our number one priority.”

And while I include council’s current salaries as well as the proposed salary raises and perks in stating that taxpayers are not getting value for the wages they currently pay council – I do not include the $9000 paid to Tim Dillon & Associates in this lack of value.

Not that I don’t consider the $9000 paid to Tim Dillon & Associates to permit council to squander yet more taxpayer dollars – in this instance directly stuffing taxpayer dollars into council’s personal pockets – a misuse of city funds.

It is just that $9000 seems a fairly cheap price, perhaps even a bargain, when you contrast the outcome, the proposed 9% pay raise, with the nearly 50% pay raise council arrived at, and gave themselves, on their own 3 years ago.

“Getting good value for money [for taxpayers] is our number one priority.”

Laughable.

If there was any relationship between ‘value for money’ and the wages paid to Abbotsford’s current council, taxpayers would be getting an extremely large refund of the wages city council has paid itself.

Instead council is going to give itself ongoing yearly salary increases, benefits and perks. Business as usual – council (or friends) get the mine and taxpayers get the shaft.