Managing the city of Kelowna is a big job, one that pays very well.
So well, in fact, it has some questioning why the city manager’s compensation in Kelowna is nearly as much as that of his counterpart in B.C.’s largest city.
According to the so-called “sunshine list,” B.C. municipalities’ legal requirement to disclose the salaries of employees paid more than $75,000 a year, Kelowna city manager Doug Glichrist received a salary and expense package just shy of $384,000 in 2024.
“That’s an eye-watering amount of money for a municipal bureaucrat in Kelowna to be raking home from taxpayers every single year,” said Carson Binda, B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
In fact, Gilchrist’s compensation package is just $5,000 less than the city manager’s salary in Vancouver, a city more than four times the size of Kelowna.
Gilchrist is also making over $100,000 more than B.C. Premier David Eby.
“I think Kelowna City Council owes us some really clear explanation as to what this bureaucrat is doing and why they deserve this massive salary that seems out of whack with other folks in the province,” Binda said.
“What benefit is there to the citizens of Kelowna, to taxpayers in Kelowna, for this massive compensation?”
Kelowna’s budget for 2024 was at around $855 million, while Vancouver’s came in at more than double that, $2.2 billion.
“I don’t know the workload that is required, maybe it’s similar,” said Kelowna resident Roger Hazard. “It’s not very rational to say a population of a million should be the same as a population of, you know, 150,000, 200,000.”
Kelowna resident Josephine Griffiths called the compensation “mindboggling.”
“I believe it should probably be indicative of the fact it’s three times smaller, maybe the wage should also be congruent with that,” she said.
Global News contacted the city Wednesday morning seeking comment from both Gilchrist and Mayor Tom Dyas.
We never heard back about Dyas, while Gilchrist responded late in the day, defending his compensation and saying there’s a process in place that sets staff salaries, including his.
“I’m certainly not going to apologize for what I get paid, nor what we pay any of our city employees,” he said.
Gilchrist said that while his salary is generally in line with comparable municipalities, he adds Kelowna is in a somewhat unique position.
“We have a much broader range of services than a lot of municipalities in the province, we have a municipally run international airport, we run a regional landfill, we run regional services on behalf of the regional district,” he said.
“There’s vast differences about the breadth and depth of the services we provide.”
According to the sunshine list for 2024, two dozen city staffers made more than $150,000, not including the dozens of firefighters on the city’s payroll.