Kenora council passed a bylaw at a council meeting on Wednesday raising council pay by 1.5 per cent.
The mayor will now get $41,263 and each councillor will receive $20,706.
Council remuneration was discussed at the committee of the whole meeting last week.
Coun. Kelsie Van Belleghem noted the total increase for the raise is about $2,600, split among the seven members of council.
Mayor Andrew Poirier said he knows there will be people who will complain.
“My suggestion to them is you put yourself in one of these chairs,” he said. “We don't do it for the money.”
Poirier said he’s had never met someone who has done it for the financial gains.
“For the time that people put in and I can think of many other things to do to make this amount of money or more and I'm sure everybody else can, who's away from their work quite a bit and, and people that are just putting time in to make things better for the community.”
He said he thinks the amount for the increase was reasonable.
“It follows process, it follows policy and it follows tradition,” he said.
Poirier said these incremental adjustments on a regular basis is the best way to do it.
“I was around in the early 2000 when, for whatever reason, for several years and it might be 10, [the salary] never changed. And so what ended up happening? It's like this pent-up demand for salary increases. You keep someone at zero for so long and at some point you pay and you pay in spades,” he said.
“But leaving it for all those years, what happened is they went back and did a study and found it was way out of whack and it cost the municipality a lot of money to bring it back up to that.”
Poirier said the salary freezes never ended up saving any money.
“Hopefully, we never get back into that situation where someone thinks it's beneficial to not increase it for a lot of years. Now, there may be years where for whatever reason we can't do it, but leaving it for, 10, 12 or 15 years was not a smart thing to do and it ended up costing the municipality more,” he said.
