Sudbury council vows to be more transparent about the salaries of non-union city staff

How much some senior level, non-union employees of Greater Sudbury make per year will now be public as the municipal council voted to include those details on the city's website.

This comes after a couple of city councillors say they were blindsided by the news that some senior level employees received a double digit pay increase last year.

They say they found out at the same time as the public did when a confidential report was leaked to local media earlier this spring. 

But others on council say they were told about the increase months before the leak, with corporate services general manager Kevin Fowke saying the information was shared in a closed meeting ahead of budget deliberations last fall.

The disagreement on the timeline of events – and whether the city's chief administrative officer Ed Archer should've disclosed the information to council earlier on – created some tense conversations at the council table on Tuesday.

Councillors Mark Signoretti, Mike Parent and Pauline Fortin presented a successful motion to revoke the authority council delegated to Archer last September. 

The authority gave him the power to greenlight salary increases for non-union city staff without needing the approval of council. 

When given this power, Archer was asked to follow the city's compensation policy and increase salaries so that they would be comparable to those offered in other municipalities.

"Seeing the size of increase that was provided, even with the explanation, it seems way out of line for what should be required at that level," said Signoretti. 

"With the retroactive, the [cost] was in excess of half a million dollars … these are fairly significant decisions that really should be brought to and made by council," added Parent. 

Coun. Natalie Labbée says the 'non-disclosure' of the information about salaries had negative impacts on other city employees.

"It has affected the rest of our staff who did not get an 11 per cent increase. It has been like a cancer growing within our organization and it should never happen again," she said.

Her colleague Deb McIntosh of Ward 9 disagreed, arguing that council had been told about a need to boost salaries and had asked Archer to conduct that work.

"Council did this with the full knowledge of what we were directing our CAO to do and based on the data we were provided," she said.