City of Cambridge Mayor Liggett and councillors approved an average 8.4% increase in the 2024 municipal salaries, wages and benefits (SWB) budget.
That’s 3 times the current 2.8% rate of inflation rate!
Who among Cambridge’s property tax payers received an 8.4% wage increase in 2024? Its a slap in the face of hard working residents lucky to get a wage increase even equal to inflation. And remember that Cambridge municipal employees also have over 30% in benefits, adding to their total compensation. Typical property taxpayer benefits are in the 18% range.
This increase is not for City employees to catch up with inflation. They have already caught up with inflation. Its just icing on the cake.
The Property Taxpayers Alliance suggests that Cambridge residents contact their councillors to ask them why they supported the 8.4% wage increase.
It is possible your councillor didn’t even understand she/he was approving the 8.4% increase when voting yes to pass the 2024 budget, as the SWB information was buried so deep and spread out so thin in the budget that it took a whole day going page by page to total it up. Talk about lack of disclosure and transparency in the budget.
And if your councillor did understand they were approving an 8.4% SWB increase, please remember this when election time comes. If your councillor challenges the 8.4% increase, please see below for the analysis showing the increases by dept.
The only one who voted against the 2024 budget, and therefore the 8.4% SWB increase, was councillor Shwery representing ward 1.
Mayor Liggett said there was no more “fat” to cut in the 2024 budget. Really? I would beg to differ. The City passed a $165.4 million operating budget for 2024. Of that, 57% or $94.3 million, was for employee SWBs. The 2023 SWBs were ~$87 million. That’s a $7.3 million increase. If the City’s 2024 SWB increase was just at the Bank of Canada’s projected inflation rate of 2.5%, the City would have saved $5.13 million. That’s a lot of fat mayor Liggett!
And there are umpteen other areas where such excesses exist including discretionary spending on pet projects, cost over-runs on mismanaged developments and special interest group funding.
Enough is Enough.
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