Is Nanaimo City Hall 'Top Heavy'?

Nanaimo City Taxpayer Dollars At 'Work'?

The average Nanaimo taxpayer looks to their city to provide them with the basic necessities they expect in an urban setting for which they expect to pay their taxes for value received.

These basic services will include water, sewer, roads, police, fire protection, garbage pickup and snow removal. These are the basic necessities on top of which you can expect to find parks and recreation facilities if the community is prosperous enough to be able to afford them.

All of these services require workers with varying degrees of skills to maintain expected service levels. The labour force consists of the men and women wearing workboots and hardhats who turn the wrenches and run and maintain the equipment to keep our city humming along. There are another group of workers in the city employ who ride desks and plan and organize the work flow. Then there is another level of workers who provide the plans and strategies to insure the city continues to grow going forward.

It would be interesting to assess whether or not the boots on the ground workers are really the ones who keep the city humming and whether or not all of the middle and upper management play as vital a role.

Nanaimo employees are members of CUPE which is a powerul union which one could argue actually calls the shots when it comes to how costly the labour portion of running our city is going to be. Whether or not there has ever been any true negotiations of city hall wages is subject of debate. There are not the same conditions at city hall as there is in the private sector when it comes to wage negotiations. To that end city staff can expect to receive annual raises regardless of the general conditions of the local economy. After all if the cost of wages goes up the city manager and city council simply raise taxes.

The effect the union has on staff productivity is obvious when compared to productivity in the private sector. The idea that a city job will have one guy on the shovel and 7 people supervising may not be accurate all the time but there is some truth in that perception.