Sudbury council vows to be more transparent about salaries of non-union city staff

How much some senior-level, non-union employees of Greater Sudbury make per year will now be public as the municipal council voted to include those details on the city's website.

This comes after a couple of city councillors say they were blindsided by the news that some senior-level employees received a double-digit pay increase last year.

They say they found out at the same time as the public did when a confidential report was leaked to local media earlier this spring. 

But others on council say they were told about the increase months before the leak, with corporate services general manager Kevin Fowke saying the information was shared in a closed meeting ahead of budget deliberations last fall.

The disagreement on the timeline of events — and whether the city's chief administrative officer Ed Archer should've disclosed the information to council earlier on — created some tense conversations at the council table on Tuesday.

Unanimously voting to revoke CAO's delegated authority

Councillors Mark Signoretti, Mike Parent and Pauline Fortin presented a successful motion to revoke the authority council delegated to Archer last September. 

The authority gave him the power to greenlight salary increases for non-union city staff without needing the approval of council. 

When given this power, Archer was asked to follow the city's compensation policy and increase salaries so that they would be comparable to those offered in other municipalities.

"Seeing the size of increase that was provided, even with the explanation, it seems way out of line for what should be required at that level," said Signoretti. 

"With the retroactive, the [cost] was in excess of half a million dollars … these are fairly significant decisions that really should be brought to and made by council," added Parent. 

Coun. Natalie Labbée said the 'non-disclosure' of the information about salaries had negative impacts on other city employees.

"It has affected the rest of our staff who did not get an 11 per cent increase. It has been like a cancer growing within our organization and it should never happen again."

'We knew exactly what we were getting into': councillor

Her colleague, Deb McIntosh of Ward 9, disagreed, arguing council had been told about a need to boost salaries and asked Archer to conduct that work.

"Council did this with the full knowledge of what we were directing our CAO to do and based on the data we were provided," she said. 

Coun. Bill Leduc suggested some councillors were attempting to place the blame for an unpopular decision on the CAO. 

"We knew exactly what we were going into," he said. 

"We give our staff the okay to move forward and make that decision on our behalf and then we get caught by the public and we want to throw our staff in front of the bus versus us standing up saying yeah we did it."

Council will now publish pay scales for all classifications on the city's website, along with information about the market adjustment criteria for non-union staff. 

It will also debate future reports on compensation policies in committee or in council.