CDH Auxiliary filled with fundraising dynamos Shawnigan regains provincial field hockey title
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Friday, November 15, 2013
CAR BANGED UP, ABANDONED Mounties were searching for clues Sunday morning about 10 a.m. as a tow truck removed a white sedan from a field on Cowichan Lake Road. The badly damaged vehicle had been sitting in a field, perpendicular to the pavement, but had been driven into the area through an opening in the fence some ways east down the road, police said at the scene. Traffic was backed up in both directions as removing the vehicle meant blocking the entire roadway. [LEXI BAINAS/CITIZEN]
CVRD wages frozen in advance of salary review SARAH SIMPSON CITIZEN
Bruce Fraser, CVRD director
There will be no pay hikes for Cowichan Valley Regional District directors, Chief Administrative Officer Warren Jones or any of the CVRD’s general managers in 2014. The regional district’s board of directors reported their decision publicly following a closed session on Wednesday evening. Shawnigan Lake Director Bruce Fraser made it clear the freeze was not indicative of poor performance by any of those affected. “This is a structural issue of
board budgeting that needs to be confronted and it is most emphatically not a comment on the performance of individual staff members or the staff as a whole,” he said. The move is simply to address the escalating costs of the regional district’s salary structure and that the board is universally supportive of and values the work of senior staff, Fraser noted. “It would be inappropriate to have it seen as criticism of the working values of the team,” he said. “But it’s a necessary response to our responsibility for
budget management.” During their in camera (closed) session, directors also agreed to ask the 2014 board chair to establish a compensation review standing committee to examine the issues surrounding compensation paid to the groups affected by the wage freeze prior to the 2015 budget process, which would include, but not be limited to, annual percentage increases and the question of comparator groups. Sahtlam/Glenora/Cowichan Station Dir. Loren Duncan hoped the committee would produce
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meaningful work, and not just act as a “Hoover” to suck the issue out of the public eye and into backrooms. “Hoover committees are those that are designed and brought forward to suck up the energy and often the people that are members of the committee don’t know this,” Duncan said. “Hopefully that’s not what’s happening here.” Duncan wants to expand the wage structure examination to include all CVRD staff and agreed with Dir. Phil Kent, who said the See We’ve got • page 4