SALAMANCA — A tie-breaking decision Wednesday by Mayor Sandra Magiera kept the Common Council from denying the Board of Public Utilities members from receiving compensation for attending board meetings retroactive to this June.
Council members John “Jack” Hill and Janet Koch voted in favor of a resolution denying $200 per meeting compensation while Kylee Johnson and Barry Smith voted in opposition to it. Paul Myers, who sits on the Board of Public Utilities as the council representative, abstained.
In a pre-council work session, city attorney Jeff Swiatek said the council has the legal authority to decide whether members of the BPU can receive compensation because of changes to the city charter two years ago.
“We’ve never had anything to do with their hiring, firing, wages, anything, but because the charter has that in there now, and they’re part of the charter, we talked about excluding the BPU from that Section 47,” Magiera said. “We don’t pay any of them. None of the taxpayer money goes to what they do.”
Koch said she looked through BPU board meeting minutes from the past year, saying many board meetings lasted shorter than an hour long. While a couple meetings she listed were nearly two hours long, there was also one meeting that lasted 10 minutes and one that lasted 20 minutes.
“I think $200 a meeting is ludicrous for that amount of time they’re putting in,” Koch said.
“It is not for the meeting,” said Dennis Hensel, BPU general manager. “It is for all the time before the meeting. You keep skewing that. You’re lying to the public.”
“I’m not lying to the public,” Koch replied. “It’s getting paid to go to these meetings.”
“I believe most of the boards and some of the members put in the time, but not all of them,” Hill said. “But $200 for a meeting is too much.”
“I think $200 is high, but with them paying their own people, I don’t really have a problem with it,” Johnson said.
A reason given for compensating board members was to find people who would be willing and qualified to do the work that otherwise wouldn’t if there was no compensation.
Koch also noted that one previous BPU member who has since been removed had missed eight meetings in the past year. She said if people aren’t attending meetings, the department head needs to request the mayor appoint a new member who is willing to sit on a board.
Smith said the BPU is a part of the city in one sense but it’s also an outcrop from the city that operates as a business.
“I would want to have people that I know have the education or knowledge or willingness to work with them,” he said. “It may only be an hour meeting, but how much paperwork did they do ahead before, did they read, did they call people, did they talk to people? How much time did they actually spend doing the board work for the BPU?”
Koch, who had sat on the BPU for many years, said many members were reading their information packets for the first time the nights of the meetings. Myers said with the recent projects including a water study and the proposed $25 million water project, the members were reading what they could ahead of time to know what they were talking about.
“There are other city boards that get paid,” he added, including the Assessment Board of Review, the Joint Leasing Committee and the Housing Authority.
“Those people are not appointed by the council,” Koch replied. “Those are mayor-only appointments. The BPU is the council.”
Smith said whether or not the council could legally allow or not allow the BPU members to be compensated had been double-checked by several parties, adding it wasn’t as if only a couple of people were trying to get extra pay.
