City council will receive an update this afternoon on the Salary Market comparison for 2019-2020 for non-union employees, with three options on how to move forward.
A number of similar cities to Windsor were used as market comparators in the report, including:
- Municipality of Chatham Kent
- City of Kitchener
- City of Guelph
- City of Thunder Bay
- Greater Sudbury
- City of Brampton
- Region of Halton
- Niagara Region
- Region of Waterloo
- City of London
- Region of Durham
- City of Hamilton
An executive committee was formed to help guide the project after the unfortunate passing of the consultant used by the City to produce the report, which later found some discrepancies with data between the executive summary report and the full report which officials say caused some concern with the validity of the end results.
Council has three options to consider.
Option 1 is to have a new consultant complete a salary market review for 2019/2020, Option 2 is to change the target percentile from the 50th to the 55th for the 2019/2020 salary market review as recommended by the Committee and Option 3 is to accept the data as is and remain at the 50th percentile resulting in no salary adjustment.
Ward 8 councillor Gary Kaschak says Windsor is not alone having issues retaining staff, as are neighbouring municipalities, at a time when they need more administration, more staff and there's a need to pay people better.
He says they're finding there's quite a lot of competition for these kinds of jobs.
"Various people are being offered jobs at other municipalities and towns within Essex County, and also outside of Essex County as we've seen. When you look at the report these are high paying jobs, they do pay well but these are 60 hour a week jobs that people do at our City administration who are very important to the city and very important to city councillors," he said.
Kaschak says it's important that they keep as many people as they can moving forward, remain competitive and get things done in a timely manner.
"In the report it talks about 30 per cent of the staff that can retire within five years, you know that's a concern as well. So there's a lot of institutional knowledge that we would like to keep and see passed on to the right people. I think it's a good review, I think it's something that we need to do as a council and to make sure that we're competitive at our high level end jobs."
He says he'd be open to the option of completing a new review, as the last report had it moved down from the 65th percentile down to 50th due to the economic downturn.
Kaschak says now that the economy has bounced back from the pandemic it's certainly something they could go back and look at retroactively.
"I like the option there to do that, and potentially if we have to pay out a little extra money we will," he continued. "We certainly want to retain some of our best people because we've lost some good people at the City recently due to retirements and going to other places. It's important to keep that knowledge in tact and pass it on to the next group that's going to take over."
Windsor's city council meeting gets underway at 4 p.m.
- with files from AM800's Rob Hindi