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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Are we paying our mayors enough?
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi deserves voters' confidence. (CNS)
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's gaffes include reading while driving. (CP)
Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz's planning decisions are questionable.
The special mayor episode of Winnipeg Internet Pundits got me thinking about mayors. My particular train of thought revolved around mayoral performance. Why do mayors always seem to underperform? Is it just my perception, or do cities generally have a hard time attracting capable leaders?
I think most Winnipeggers can relate to this. Before our last civic election, there was near-unanimous consensus that Mayor Sam Katz was doing a poor job: making poor planning decisions, spending too much time in Phoenix and not enough running the city, screwing up rapid transit, screwing up active transportation, doing things that were uncomfortably close to conflict of interest, burying us in an infrastructure deficit, poisoning the relationship with the province...
Yet, he won the election easily because there was nobody else worth voting for. Why?
We're not alone here, or at least I get the impression we're not. I hear stories from time to time of wacky or incompetent mayors in other cities. Even Toronto, with a population base eight times bigger than ours, can't find a dignified mayor. Rob Ford is a controversial guy who battles with the media and often says ill-advised things like "Roads are built for buses, cars and trucks. Not for people on bikes. And my heart bleeds for them when I hear someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day." That's just the start of his controversies, which include reading while driving.
Before Ford, in the late '90s and early '00s, there was a guy named Mel Lastman. He was a furniture salesman by trade, and he didn't change a bit as mayor. He was definitely the Kern Hill/David Keam of mayors. Business acumen is a plus for sure, but crazy TV ads impersonating a U.S. president probably don't help. Whatever good things Lastman did, he is probably best remembered as the mayor who installed giant coloured moose all over the city.
Now, there are certainly exceptions. One might point to Calgary's Naheed Nenshi as an example. However, I believe there is a definite trend.
The question is: How do we reverse the trend? A while ago I suggested we should encourage politicians to accept free Jets tickets as a perk to attract better candidates. I was only joking, but that may be on the right track. Are we paying mayors enough? Sam Katz earns $126,000 per year (plus perks). Rob Ford earns $168,000 as mayor of The Big Smoke. That seems like a lot of money to an average Fred, but in terms of experienced professionals capable of running a large organization, it's not. Even Sam's own chief of staff earns almost as much as he does. In the private sector, management jobs routinely run well into six figures.
You could argue that all public leaders are underpaid, relatively speaking, but the office of prime minister, for example, has the prestige of the job to attract candidates. A mayor's job consists of making decisions about road repairs and trash collection, not globe-trotting and hobnobbing with dignitaries. As a result, it tends to attract either long shots with nothing to lose or wealthy business people who have something to gain.
Every once in a while a capable long shot like Nenshi might get on the ballot and win, but more often then not, our mayor ends up being a businessman for whom the job is a hobby or a means to an end. A larger salary could be a small price to pay to improve those odds.
-- follow this blog at anybody-want-a-peanut.blogspot.ca
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 19, 2012 A10
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