The Week: We’ve got the data! A look ahead at busy councils, and Good/Bad news

Comox Valley local governments and all public sector organizations must file an annual Statement of Financial Information on or before June 30. It’s a public transparency document that itemizes how a municipality or a health authority spent your tax dollars in the preceding year.

Several candidates in this year’s Courtenay election threw tantrums about the lack of transparency in city finances, including elected Councillor Dick Clancy. He was surprised to learn that he could find everything there is to know about local government finances on municipal websites. It’s all publicly available.

But to save you and Dick the trouble, Decafnation has compiled some of the more interesting and essential information from all three municipalities in 2025, the latest SOFIs on record. Former Courtenay council member Melanie McCollum helped Decafnation create them.

And if you’re really into data, you could look back at similar spreadsheets covering the years 2014-2021 that Decafnation published on Jan. 25, 2021. In the meantime, here are some highlights.

The first three spreadsheets show each municipality’s taxes from 2021 to 2025, the yearly percentage and a four year average increase. It will surprise some that the City of Courtenay’s tax hike was the lowest of our local governments.

Another spreadsheet looks at the salaries of municipal councillors and Electoral Area directors, and shows each jurisdiction’s cost of governance.

Because municipal council members serve on the Comox Valley Regional District board in various capacities, their regional compensation is broken out and fluctuates with the level of their CVRD engagement. Former Courtenay Councillor Will Cole-Hamilton, for example, chaired the regional board in 2025, and was paid accordingly.

The City of Courtenay’s cost of governance per capita at $10.66 – about a buck higher than 2019 – was lower than both Comox and Cumberland, but not nearly as low as the Electoral Areas at $5.71. Rural residents get a deal from their CVRD representatives.

All of the sheets use population figures from the 2021 census.

Although it isn’t calculated on the spreadsheets, Courtenay council members are paid about 42 percent of the mayor’s salary. In Cumberland, it’s 60 percent, a much closer gap. In Comox, it’s 45 percent. In 2027, the Courtenay wage gap will increase, with councillors earning only 40 percent of the mayor’s $95,000 payday.

If new Courtenay Mayor Manno Theos wants to save taxpayers money, he could take a $7,000 pay cut in 2026-27. That would reduce the wage gap with council members up to about 44 percent.

The third spreadsheet shows municipal staff salaries. Municipalities break out wages paid over $75,000 and under $75,000. The percentages refer to the total salaries from both groups.

The Town of Comox has the lowest staffing cost per capita of the three municipalities and that was also true in 2019, even though more town employees have moved into the $75,000 and over category. The CVRD shows the lowest staffing cost per capita at $202, but comparing the regional district to the municipalities is misleading because of the complex nature of regional district finances.

BUSY WEEK AHEAD FOR COUNCILS

Both Comox and Courtenay councils meet next Wednesday, Nov. 18. It will be the first regular meetings of their respective four-year terms. And both have big issues to discuss.

The Comox Town Council faces a difficult issue about how to handle a building permit application for the property at 1890 Comox Avenue. They will receive a staff report next week informing them about the implications of downzoning the property from six-storeys to four and other factors, including how a 44-unit apartment building accessed only by the town’s main roadway will affect traffic.

No decision is likely to be made on that issue before the council’s Dec. 9 meeting.

In Courtenay, Mayor Manno Theos might bring back his list of appointments and press council for another vote. His list was defeated at the inaugural meeting on Nov. 4, because council members felt the new mayor should focus on building connections within the city.

Bringing back motions, whether previously carried or defeated, is a special power granted only to mayors. Of course, if the mayor isn’t guaranteed the motion will be reversed, it could easily backfire.

Sources have told Decafnation that newly elected Councillor Rosanna Chamberlin intends to decline any outside council appointments given to her. She may spend most of her week in Victoria, where her main physiotherapy office is located. She also has a newer Courtenay office, but apparently won’t have time while here for much of anything apart from attending meetings.

It’s also expected that new Councillor Dick Clancy, a retired Vancouver police officer, will at some point make a motion regarding public safety, either in regards to how the RCMP deal with unhoused people on the street or to increase the number of officers contracted by the City. These issues were part of his campaign.

The two council’s agendas will be released today.

CUMBERLAND COUNCIL NEWS

The Village of Cumberland held its first regular meeting on Monday, Nov. 9 and decided to apply for a provincial grant to design a sewer extension along Union Road. The Village could get up to $100,000 or 80 percent of the design costs. The extension would service village property for future development and private properties without sewer service.

The Village also awarded a half-million dollar contract to engineer a replacement for the No. 2 dam, as part of the village’s $7 million water infrastructure upgrade project.

Cumberland and Courtenay are both conducting public surveys to determine residents’s priorities. You can take the survey here and here.

IN OTHER NEWS

GOOD NEWS – The world did not end today. Not yet, anyway. Three physicists claimed in a Science magazine article written 60 years ago that humans would “be squeezed to death” by Nov. 13, 2026. They based their argument, published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, that because the human population was doubling faster than ever before, it would eventually kill off our species. They also predicted a world population of 25 billion by 2020, a miss by a mere 17 billion or so. So there’s hope. But the day isn’t over yet.

GOOD NEWS – More than 122 acres of forest, wetlands, estuary and shoreline in the Deep Bay area have been preserved. The Comox Valley Land Trust, BC Parks
Foundation, the Nanaimo & Area Land Trust and the Wilson 5 Foundation provided the funding. The CVLT contributed $100,000 and the Denman Conservancy Association donated $25,000.

GOOD NEWS –A Cowichan Bay woman spent this week in court, getting a first-hand education in how the legal system handles climate change lawsuits. Sierra Robinson had turned 17 in 2019 when she joined 13 other young Canadians in a lawsuit against the federal government for violating their Charter Rights. They argued the government had failed to meet emissions reductions and that the Net-Zero Act provided no guarantees Canada will meet any of its climate targets. The case just made it to trial this week in the Vancouver Federal Courts. It’s expected to last five weeks.

GOOD NEWS – If you like travelling to exotic locations, here’s the chance of a lifetime. NASA has opened applications for a new field of astronauts who will live on the moon and maybe take sidetrips to Mars.

BAD NEWS – The World Meteorological Organization reports that the last 12 years have been the warmest in known human history, which is just a blip in cosmic time.