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WUC’s up???
Posted by: Donald McArthur
September 12, 2007. 6:26 pm
…It was, I thought, an easy enough question to answer and a relevant one at that.
How much, I wanted to know, did Max Zalev, the acting general manager of the Windsor Utilities Commission, make in that role last year? I didn’t feel the question was impudent or particularly invasive given the controversy surrounding an 86 per cent water rate hike and the fact the utility is owned by the city and overseen by a board that includes city councillors and the mayor.
I also wanted to know how much Zalev made last year in his capacity as head of Enwin Utilities Ltd. and how much he made as head of Windsor Canada Utilities, which is the umbrella organization overseeing local utilities.
All of these creatures are overseen by boards that include city councillors compensated for services rendered.
The money doled out to councillors on those boards — the WUC folks get $679.67 per month or $8,156 per year whether they go to a meeting or not or whether those meetings last for six minutes or six hours — gets divvied up equally among all councillors, which is why council has been so much fun to watch in recent weeks.
The reason I was curious about the compensation being paid to Zalev, of course, is because it seems like an awful lot of responsibility for some pretty important things — our water and our electricity — has been invested into one individual, an individual who was appointed rather than elected to his posts.
I wanted to know if ratepayers were paying one man one salary to do three different jobs or if they were paying one man three salaries. I’m not saying Zalev doesn’t work hard and doesn’t deserve the salary he makes — whatever it might be — but that the public deserves to know what he makes.
I believe these questions are relevant given utilities are publicly-owned even if some are privately run. Had the folks at the Windsor Utilities Commission handed residents an 86 per cent water rate decrease this year, I probably wouldn’t be asking them. Had city councillors not unanimously called for an audit of WUC’s financials, I probably wouldn’t be asking them either. But they did and I am and nobody’s talking.
I phoned up a spokeswoman for the utilities on Friday and asked some very specific salary questions. She said she would get back me as soon as she could but she hadn’t by mid-morning on Tuesday. I found the delay odd so I decided to phone Zalev himself.
I left a message on his voice mail about 11 a.m. Tuesday outlining my specific salary questions. I didn’t get a call back so I phoned him again about 3 p.m. and was told by a woman, presumably his secretary, he was just beginning a conference call. I left another message. A few minutes later the spokeswoman finally phoned me back. Perhaps the timing was a coincidence. Perhaps not. I do know she didn’t have any satisfactory answers.
“It’s not a question of whether we want to answer or we don’t want to answer. We are certainly sensitive to the issue, weighing the public’s right to know,” she said. “However, we are in a situation where we have some rules in regards to employee information and that is that is remains confidential. We cannot speak about it.”
I told her that no rules would prevent Zalev from divulging his salary and that I had already left two messages with him but he hadn’t called me back. I asked her if she had spoken with Zalev about my questions and whether she had asked him to waive confidentiality so ratepayers can learn how much he makes.
“This is all that we can tell you,” she responded, adding Zalev doesn’t even work for the Windsor Utilities Commission. “He performs the acting general manager services for WUC but he works for Enwin.”
Curious that. The fact Zalev works for Enwin raises interesting questions. Will an audit of WUC, as the city has requested, be able to look at the compensation paid to him and others if they don’t actually work for WUC? What else won’t the audit be able to probe because of this division of responsibilities between the two groups?
This blog is stretching into an opus now so I should probably cut it short. The crazy thing is that it wouldn’t have been written at all if officials could simply tell us how much is paid to the guy heading up the corporations responsible for our electricity and water. It’s pretty simple stuff. I just don’t get all the secrecy.
I’ve never understood this whole taboo against asking what people make anyways. What’s the big deal? We know what police officers and firefighters and teachers make. We learn what autoworkers make, down to the penny, every time they ink a new collective bargaining agreement. As an editorial writer here at The Star, I make $1,336.61 a week before taxes, which works out to $69,503.72 per year. I’m pretty sure I’d make a lot less if I wasn’t in the CAW.
But we still don’t know what Zalev gets for running the utilities that look after our water and power. A knowledgeable source tells me he gets a base salary of $175,000 plus $35,000 in lieu of benefits, which totals $210,000. He also receives a pay-for-performance bonus but I’m not sure what that worked out to last year.
These numbers are unconfirmed of course. I couldn’t confirm them with Zalev because he has yet to call me back.
http://blogs.windsorstar.com/2007/09/12/wucs-up/
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