Councillor Niesh joins online conversation on civic staff salaries

The release of financial information this week at Monday's City Council session has made for a current of conversation on social media for much of the last four days, with residents weighing in online when it comes to the nature of payroll and civic spending.

As we first outlined on the blog last Friday, the City has posted the final element of the financial process for the year to the city website, providing for a range of reports that is part of the civic obligations when it comes to financial disclosure.

Among the information reports available for the public to review are:

Annual Report for the City of Prince Rupert
Details on Civic employee Compensation and Benefits
Details on the Salaries and Expenses of City Council members
Report on Supplier payments for 2017

The reports were publicly presented to City Council on Monday evening by City Manager Robert Long and the City's Financial Officer Corinne Bomben, the full documentation can be found from as part of the Agenda Package from the Monday June 11th council session from pages 44 to 154.

Councillor Wade Niesh
shared his observations on
civic compensation this week

As the public began to review those items, one of the streams of comment came through the Northern View's Facebook page, based on a story that  reviewed the civic employee salaries information on Tuesday.

That Facebook commentary on the theme of civic compensation, caught the attention of City Councillor Wade Neish, who composed a rebuttal of sorts to some of the observations from the public.

The majority of his contribution to the conversation was to explore some background on the work of the City Manager and other upper level civic officials as they tackled a range of issues facing the city.

So far, Mr. Niesh is the only city council representative that appears to have issued any comments related to the material that had been presented to Council on Monday.

Three of the six members of the current city council, Mayor Lee Brain, Councillor Blair Mirau and Councillor Barry Cunningham, are all fairly active on Social media and host Facebook accounts to put forward their thoughts on a range of political and community themes.

However to this point, those forums remain free of any commentary related to Monday's notes on salaries, expenses or civic spending and none appear to have joined in on the discussion found in other social media forums.

As well, Council members collectively had little to say on Monday evening when the reports were delivered, with none of the Council members in attendance at the Monday Council session sharing any observations, or comments following the introduction of the material.

You can review the topics from the night that did capture their attention on Monday from our Council Timeline feature here.

For more items of note related to City Council discussions see our archive page here.


Cross posted from the North Coast Review