Below are my comments on the Mayor’ s assertion that the cost of Owen Sound Expenses wages is less than other municipalities in his response to questions put to him by the Editor of OwenSoundCurrent.com

“Using accurate, up-to-date 2022 data that we have access to” Is the mayor trying to imply that the data I used in my report was not accurate? If so, he is  implying that the city's Audited Financial Statements are not accurate since that's what my report used to develop the charts and graphs. However we know that the city's Audited Financial Statements are certified by the city’s auditor and as such are irrefutable.

In my study I used the 2021 Audited Financial Statements because they were the latest available. The 2022 Audited Financial Statements were only made available to the public on 20 Dec 2023 which coincidentally was the same day that the mayor responded to the Editor of the Owen Sound Current with his assertions that Owen Sound was doing better than the other municipalities.

I used these latest statements to revisit my previous work and did not find any significant differences from the 2021 statements. These statements show that in 2022 Owen Sound spent significantly more on “non-Protective Services” wages than the other municipalities on as shown below in figure 1. As you can see, even in 2022, Owen Sound spent more on wages than each of the municipal comparators I used in my study, which, bye the way, are very similar to Owen Sound in population, population-density and occupied dwellings.

What the Mayor did was to look at only one of the eight expense categories, Administration. He is correct that when comparing only Administration Salaries & Benefits Owen Sound has a lower expense. However when add administration with the other categories as I did in my report Owen Sound has by far the highest Salaries & Benefits expense.

So instead of focusing on the cause of Owen Sound’s high Salaries & Benefits expense relative to other municipalities he chose to showcase the single area where Owen Sound compares well. However it doesn’t matter, since when everything is included, in the Audited Financial Statements, you get the comparisons shown in my report which show that Salaries & Benefits expense is growing and continued to grow in 2022.

Figure 1; Comparing Owen Sound Salaries and Benefits Expense

Owen Sound’s wages expense has been growing for many years as shown in figure 2, while Owen Sound’s population has actually been declining as shown in figure 3. Owen Sound's Audited Financial Statements in 2015 Owen Sound Salaries & Benefits expense, excluding Protective Services, was $11,151,276. Seven years later, the Audited Financial Statements from 2022, showed this expense had grown to $13,788,936. This is a growth of $2,637,660 or 23.6% - that's wage growth!