Should we have full-time mayors?
The question as to whether or not the country should have full-time mayors is one that was raised in an article by The Malta Independent on Sunday.
In the article, this newsroom spoke to five mayors about the honorarium that they receive as remuneration for the work that they do. For the most part, the mayors agreed that the current remuneration system doesn’t reflect the work put in, but there was disagreement as to whether the role should be a full-time one.
Żebbuġ Mayor, Steve Zammit Lupi, for instance, said that that putting mayors on a full-time pay would increase the standards and level of commitment, ultimately benefitting the locality. It would also attract more talent to local councils, he said. “Everyone wants top performing local councils but the conditions aren’t there, and it reflects in the candidates. You have a lot of people who are reluctant to get involved in local politics because it simply doesn’t pay”, he pointed out.
On the other hand, St Paul’s Bay Mayor, Censu
Galea, said that local councils will benefit from full-time posts being introduced, but said that one must also take into consideration what would happen when a mayor is not re-elected. “The difficulty of full-time is tied to when you finish from your post, that’s the real problem. You don’t have a guarantee forever here”, he said.
Swieqi Mayor, Noel Muscat, on the other hand, said that he wouldn’t do the job if it were a fulltime one because he has his own company to run, and went a step further in saying that he believes that if the council doesn’t face the massive problems that it does on a day-to-day basis, a full-time mayor is not necessary.
When debating such an idea, one would also need to take into consideration the size of a locality. For example, being Mayor of Sliema would be very different from being Mayor of Ħal Safi, in terms of the workload required. Perhaps introducing the option to be a full-time mayor, with a better pay than those who do not opt for it, for localities above a certain population size could be one possible way forward.
When talking about councils, one also needs to point out the need to grant them more tools and powers to be able to conduct more work, rather than having to direct people to file complaints with national authorities. Councils are, after all, the first point of contact with people who live in a locality, and councillors and the mayor would know the locality best. Councils should be given some form of enforcement arm, for example, to be able to dish out fines within a locality. Councils should be given a greater say in major planning applications that would affect the locality. These are just two examples of improvements that can be made to councils, there are others.
Councils must be made more autonomous, must be given the powers that they need to effectively run their localities more, and, in addition, be given better budgets to reflect an increase in autonomy. Having everything centralised in national authorities makes sense for certain things, like roadworks, but for other things, like enforcement of garbage collection for instance, local level would likely work best.