In a motion piggybacking off a previous discussion, Ward 6 councillor Brock McGregor is asking for receipts concerning the new Deputy Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) role.
At the January 27 council meeting, councillor Alysson Storey put forth a motion asking for transparency with the hiring of a new Deputy CAO for the municipality.
The posting, which closed on January 31, caused quite the debate as things like the relevancy of the position and where the salary would come from caused concern amongst council members.
At the January 27 meeting, CAO Michael Duben assured council that the money for the salary wouldn’t cause the municipality to go over budget. The posting listed the salary between $196,476 and $240,957.
Duben explained that while it was being referred to as a new position, he anticipated a general manager would be retiring, but wouldn’t name who the general manager was at the time.
“The deputy CAO would be paid the same amount of money as our general managers are. So when one retires, and I anticipate that will be fairly soon, those salary dollars would go to pay for that deputy CAO,” explained Duben.
McGregor told CKXS news that his motion aims to continue to explore the need for transparency and clarity with jobs such as this one.
“There’s been some significant public interest obviously in the Deputy CAO position from a cost perspective,” said McGregor.
“What it [the motion] is asking for is once the CAO has reorganized the EMT (executive management team) and hired this position, to just show what that new alignment looks like and demonstrate the cost savings that were talked about in that meeting.”
McGregor also believes the motion will open up the discussion as to what the Deputy CAO position means for the municipality.
“In my time at the municipality, I’ve seen a lot of different re-organizations of the executive management team and moving different departments under different managers,” explained McGregor.
“And we don’t always necessarily have a document or a flow chart to show what that looks like. And I think having something like that is helpful to really understand how those roles are evolving and changing and really understanding who is in charge of what.”
While McGregor doesn’t think the discussion on Monday night will last as long as the one did in January, at the end of the day he hopes it reiterates his fellow Ward 6 councillor’s initial motion on the need for transparency telling CKXS news,
“My intention is really to make sure we are following through on that conversation and demonstrating what the outcomes are and making sure some of those commitments to the role being a net savings that we can see that on paper and really follow up with those comments and questions we had initially when the posting went up.”