For the third time in less than a year, Victoria city council will debate whether they should keep getting a free lunch at taxpayers’ expense.
In a motion that will go to committee of the whole next week, Coun. Ben Isitt recommends scrapping the catered meals this year and reallocating the money to the city’s housing reserve fund.
The lunches for councillors and senior staff during daytime meetings cost about $10,000 a year.
“With the increased reliance on remote meetings and also increased economic hardship in the community, it seemed to be a cost-effective proposal to bring forward at this time,” Isitt said in an interview.
It has been a thorny issue for months. Councillors Marianne Alto and Charlayne Thornton-Joe, who don’t partake of the lunches, tried to get rid of them last January and again in April, but were outvoted by their colleagues — including Isitt.
He said that the lunches made sense previously given the number and length of council meetings.
“Making a small allocation for working lunches was, I think, a cost-effective action at that time,” he said.
“If we think of the cost of our staff time in terms of attending council meetings, potentially working through lunch resulted in substantial savings to the municipality.”
But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way council does business, he said, with shorter meetings in which some people attend virtually rather than in person.
“The balance has shifted and I think reallocating the funds in this way makes sense given the current situation.”
Isitt favours shifting the money to the housing reserve fund in the 2021 budget because issues of poverty and homelessness are front of mind for many people in the community.
“So I think reallocating funds toward affordable housing seems to be a sensible step to take.”
But Coun. Stephen Andrew, who was elected to council in a Dec. 12 byelection, said he’ll be pushing for the catered lunches to be removed from the budget permanently, rather than simply reallocating the money this year.
He promised during the campaign that one of his first motions if elected would be to end the lunches and redirect the money to social services.
“I want it dead forever,” he said in an interview.
Alto and Thornton-Joe said they will support Isitt’s motion, but they, too, would prefer to see the lunches removed from the budget altogether.
“That will be the question — whether a councillor or a colleague is going to bring it back after COVID,” Thornton-Joe said. “We don’t know, right?”
Thornton-Joe said she doesn’t believe it’s a defensible expenditure, arguing it makes sense for councillors to go their separate ways at lunch and support different businesses.
Alto agreed and said there are better ways to spend $10,000.
“In the context of the whole budget, it seems like not a lot of money,” she said.
“But I think partly it is the principle of the thing. I mean, we are workers like others and many workers work through their lunch hours, many workers have very short lunch hours and some not at all. So it is a common thing that you go to work, you take your lunch.”
Besides, Thornton-Joe quipped, someone gave her a new Peanuts lunch box for her birthday. “So I’m looking forward to that first day of work where I get to bring my new lunch kit.”
lkines@timescolonist.com
