Big increase in number of Christchurch City Council employees earning six-figure salaries

The number of Christchurch City Council employees on six-figure salaries has almost tripled since 2012.

In the 2011/2012 financial year, the city council had a total of 202 employees earning $100,000 or more.

However, the latest annual report from the city council released this week which covers the 2019/2020 financial year shows there are 593 employees within the organisation on salaries of or above $100,000.

This is an increase of 62 employees from the preceding financial year and equates to 21 per cent of the city council’s workforce of 2783 having six-figure salaries in comparison to only eight per cent of staff in 2012 earning as much.

Personnel costs represented 23.62 per cent of the council’s total expenditure of $864.5 million in the most recent report and these costs have consistently accounted for between 21 per cent and 24 per cent of total expenditure over the past six years. Whereas in 2012 personnel costs accounted for only 16 per cent of total expenditure.

This trend has also occurred alongside a relatively small increase in staff from 2516 in 2012 to 2793 in 2020.

The revelation comes at a time when the city council is attempting to cut costs and tailor its budget in response to the financial fall out of the Covid-19 pandemic.

City councillor James Gough believed the rise in salaries was “completely unsustainable,” and that the trend needed to be “urgently reviewed.”

“We need to be reducing rates and reducing borrowing and to achieve that the council needs to actually spend less, and wages are a huge component of that,” he said.

“If they [the city council] don’t, watch this worrying and unsustainable trend continue - and the person who picks up the tab is the ratepayer, and quite frankly that’s unacceptable.”

Deputy Mayor and chairman of the city council’s finance and performance committee Andrew Turner said the council was already working to find “savings and efficiencies” as it progressed towards developing its Long Term Plan for the coming decade.

“Our job as elected members is to set the levels of service and consider ways of delivering those levels of service. If you can deliver the levels of service with less staff and that results in savings then great,” he said.

“Rather than focus on who is getting paid more than $100,000 and less than $100,000, we should focus on the total wages bill and how we can resource more effectively.”

Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke said it seemed as though the $495,000 salary of city council chief executive Dawn Baxendale had created a culture of high wages within the city council.

“With the salary of the CEO it seems to trickle down into the culture of the entire organisation,” he said.

Baxendale has actually taken a 10 per cent cut to her $495,000 salary in response to the pressures of the pandemic and only last week announced she would be implementing sweeping changes to the organisation’s executive leadership team in a bid to cut costs.

The new structure will halve the number of general managers from six to three while also disestablishing 13 positions and creating eight new roles. It will save between $600,000 to $700,000 a year.

There was also no annual remuneration review this year as they can result in pay rises.

City council employee wage brackets:

Less than $60,000 – 1159
$60,000-$79,999 – 600
$80,000-$99,999 – 431
$100,000-$119,999 – 328
$120,000-$139,999 – 162
$140,000-$159,999 – 61
$160,000-$179,999 – 17
$180,000-$199,999 – 11
$200,000-$219,999 – 8
$260,000-$519,999 – 6