What the next council will be paid

What council pay has actually been — and what comes next

The Municipal Act requires an annual statement of what each member was actually paid. Ten years of those statements, retrieved from the City's meeting records, give the as-paid history. Each bar stacks what the statements report side by side: the honorarium; the role's City-paid car allowance; and, on the mayor's bar, the utility board remuneration the sitting mayor draws from PowerStream and later Alectra Inc., explained below the chart. The top segment is City-paid expenses, as reported for the mayor and deputy mayor, and as the average per ward seat for councillors, whose expenses vary person by person.

Sources: Statements of Council Remuneration and Expenses (Municipal Act s. 284), 2016–2025, City of Barrie — Finance Department. Original document. Ten annual statements, retrieved from Legistar and eScribe (each year's document id is recorded with the extraction; local copies in research/pdf/council-remuneration/, including the separately published 2024/2025 appendices). Source of the honoraria, car allowances, City-paid expenses, and the mayor's PowerStream/Alectra board pay charted on /issues/council-pay/. 2019–2023 are image-only scans, read from page renders and spot-verified. 2013–2015 were never archived and need a records request. Retrieved August 17, 2026. Staff Report CCS-007-2026 — Council Compensation Review and Revisions to the Reimbursement of Council Expenses Policy, City of Barrie — Legislative and Court Services (W. Cooke, City Clerk), dated April 22, 2026. Original document. Pages 53-60 of the General Committee agenda full package of 2026-04-22 (item 7.2); the extraction is that page range. Appendix A carries the comparator table and the proposed December 2026 rates. Retrieved August 9, 2026.

The utility board segment, explained

Alectra Inc. is the electricity utility formed in the January 2017 merger that absorbed PowerStream — the distributor Barrie Hydro had itself merged into — and the City of Barrie remains one of its municipal shareholders, a relationship Council still exercises: the motions record Barrie executing amendments to Alectra's unanimous shareholder agreement as recently as 2024. The sitting mayor has sat on the utility's board throughout this chart, and the board pays its directors: Jeff Lehman drew $31,550 from PowerStream in 2016, $46,667 across both companies in the merger year, $45,000–$48,750 a year from Alectra through 2021, and $17,917 in the partial year 2022; Alex Nuttall has drawn $55,000–$60,000 a year since 2023. The money is the utility's, not the City's tax levy, which is why the chart draws it as its own segment instead of summing it into the honorarium. Two details the statements themselves insist on: Council's own 2015 resolution (15-G-096) is what permits the mayor to accept the pay, but the appointment is made by the board of Barrie Hydro Holdings Inc. — the City's holding company — "and not by the City of Barrie"; and the figures appear in the City's statement only because the Municipal Act requires disclosing what other bodies pay council members. Each statement reports the figure separately from the City honorarium, and this page keeps that separation. It is also the only outside honorarium the statements show a mayor receiving in these ten years: no other board or body lists a payment to the sitting mayor. (The one adjacent incident is councillors', not the mayor's: the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority paid meeting per diems to council members in 2019 contrary to City policy, which only citizen appointees may accept, and was directed to remit future per diems to the City.)

Source: Statements of Council Remuneration and Expenses (Municipal Act s. 284), 2016–2025, City of Barrie — Finance Department. Original document. Ten annual statements, retrieved from Legistar and eScribe (each year's document id is recorded with the extraction; local copies in research/pdf/council-remuneration/, including the separately published 2024/2025 appendices). Source of the honoraria, car allowances, City-paid expenses, and the mayor's PowerStream/Alectra board pay charted on /issues/council-pay/. 2019–2023 are image-only scans, read from page renders and spot-verified. 2013–2015 were never archived and need a records request. Retrieved August 17, 2026.

The mayor's expenses, on their own

City-paid expenses are the part of the compensation chart that moves the most. The statements split them in two: "council expenses" — attending events on the City's behalf, hosting, communication materials, travel, and the FCM and AMO conference costs — and "corporate expenses", payments straight to suppliers for phones, internet and office costs. For the mayor's office the pattern has three phases: roughly $9,000–$13,600 a year through 2019, a pandemic trough of $2,400–$3,500, and then a different order of magnitude from 2023 — $37,033, $42,721 and $48,869 in the three Nuttall years stated, nearly all of it in the council-expenses column (2023: $36,312 of the $37,033). The statements do not itemize below those two columns; the quarterly expense reports on barrie.ca, published since 2016, carry the line-level detail.

Source: Statements of Council Remuneration and Expenses (Municipal Act s. 284), 2016–2025, City of Barrie — Finance Department. Original document. Ten annual statements, retrieved from Legistar and eScribe (each year's document id is recorded with the extraction; local copies in research/pdf/council-remuneration/, including the separately published 2024/2025 appendices). Source of the honoraria, car allowances, City-paid expenses, and the mayor's PowerStream/Alectra board pay charted on /issues/council-pay/. 2019–2023 are image-only scans, read from page renders and spot-verified. 2013–2015 were never archived and need a records request. Retrieved August 17, 2026.

The 2013–2015 statements were never captured by the Internet Archive and the City's migration dropped them; they are records-request territory, noted in the research list. The as-paid series and the proposal above meet in the middle: a councillor paid $30,737 in 2016 would be paid $48,012 under the December 2026 proposal — a 56% rise across the decade, most of it the 2019 tax-change gross-up and the two compensation reviews.

The decision

The package came to General Committee as Staff Report CCS-007-2026 from the City Clerk's office on April 22, 2026 (item 7.2). No citizen committee produced it: the 2017 and 2021–22 reviews ran through a Council Compensation Review Committee, and this one was a staff review of the same comparator group. Council adopted the recommendation unamended on April 29, 2026 (motion 2026-A-066, moved by Deputy Mayor Thomson, seconded by Councillor Kungl). It carried on a voice vote; no member requested a recorded vote, so no individual positions are on the record.

Sources: Staff Report CCS-007-2026 — Council Compensation Review and Revisions to the Reimbursement of Council Expenses Policy, City of Barrie — Legislative and Court Services (W. Cooke, City Clerk), dated April 22, 2026. Original document. Pages 53-60 of the General Committee agenda full package of 2026-04-22 (item 7.2); the extraction is that page range. Appendix A carries the comparator table and the proposed December 2026 rates. City Council Minutes, April 29, 2026 (Final), City of Barrie — City Council, dated April 29, 2026. Original document. Motion 2026-A-066 (item 11.1.8) adopts CCS-007-2026 unamended, "Carried", with no recorded vote. All retrieved August 9, 2026.

The numbers

The new base equals the average 2025 base compensation of the comparator group, indexed for 2026. The report's own words: Barrie's current bases "are slightly lower than the average of the comparator group." One reading note the report does not make explicit but its own arithmetic shows: the printed averages include Barrie itself alongside the five comparators — averaging the five other cities alone gives slightly higher figures. The averages below are the report's own, reproduced as printed. A second wrinkle: the mayor and councillor December 2026 rates each equal the printed average plus 3.75% indexing, but the deputy mayor rate sits 7.5% above its average — the report states no reason for the difference, so none is offered here. Appendix A of the report is the whole calculation, reproduced here:

Source: Staff Report CCS-007-2026 — Council Compensation Review and Revisions to the Reimbursement of Council Expenses Policy, City of Barrie — Legislative and Court Services (W. Cooke, City Clerk), dated April 22, 2026. Original document. Pages 53-60 of the General Committee agenda full package of 2026-04-22 (item 7.2); the extraction is that page range. Appendix A carries the comparator table and the proposed December 2026 rates. Retrieved August 9, 2026.

The blank Deputy Mayor cells are blank in the report itself: the average is computed from the municipalities that pay one. Dollar figures are the report's own; the December 2026 row already includes the 2026 cost-of-living adjustment. The Barrie rows are the report's 2025 base (the report gives no as-of date) and the proposal. Rows are regrouped from Appendix A for reading order — comparators, the average, then Barrie — with no figure changed; the average row's own arithmetic includes Barrie, as noted above. Three near-identical mayor figures appear on this page and measure different things: $139,660 here is the 2025 base rate, while the as-paid chart's $139.5K is the honorarium actually paid in 2025, and the chart above rounds the base to $139.7K — the closeness is rounding, not agreement.

What else is in the package

• Annual indexing each December 2027–2029 at the cost-of-living adjustment approved for the City's non-union staff.
• A new $80 per-meeting payment for statutory duties at meetings that carry no compensation of their own. Council, General Committee and Reference Committee meetings are excluded; they are part of the base.
• Car allowances of $3,000 for councillors, $4,200 for the Deputy Mayor and $7,200 for the Mayor per year.
• Optional enrollment in the non-union health and dental plan, and life insurance at twice annual remuneration.
• Expense-policy changes: the Mayor's communications budget base drops from $25,000 to $15,000 with $10,000 moved into the Mayor's Office operating budget; the Deputy Mayor's expense base rises to $7,500; the council conference budget rises to $40,000.

Source: Staff Report CCS-007-2026 — Council Compensation Review and Revisions to the Reimbursement of Council Expenses Policy, City of Barrie — Legislative and Court Services (W. Cooke, City Clerk), dated April 22, 2026. Original document. Pages 53-60 of the General Committee agenda full package of 2026-04-22 (item 7.2); the extraction is that page range. Appendix A carries the comparator table and the proposed December 2026 rates. Retrieved August 9, 2026.

For scale

Against the 2025 bases in the report's own table, the proposed December 2026 rates are increases of about 8.2% for the Mayor ($139,660 to $151,052), 12.0% for the Deputy Mayor ($51,775 to $58,012) and 8.4% for councillors ($44,276 to $48,012). Part of each increase is the 2026 cost-of-living adjustment that would have applied anyway; the report does not break the two components apart, so neither does this page.

Source: Staff Report CCS-007-2026 — Council Compensation Review and Revisions to the Reimbursement of Council Expenses Policy, City of Barrie — Legislative and Court Services (W. Cooke, City Clerk), dated April 22, 2026. Original document. Pages 53-60 of the General Committee agenda full package of 2026-04-22 (item 7.2); the extraction is that page range. Appendix A carries the comparator table and the proposed December 2026 rates. Retrieved August 9, 2026.

Compensation is one line in the wider budget: see where your property taxes go. What council actually voted on this term, with names attached where a recorded vote exists, is at council votes.