When it comes to the top-paid mayors in the GTA, the Sunshine List may not be showing taxpayers the whole bill.According to the annual public sector salary disclosure, released last month, 15 GTA mayors hit the $100,000 threshold needed to make the provincial list — with Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti once again taking the top spot in Ontario, pocketing $195,374 in 2017. But a deeper look at the salaries on the Sunshine List shows that what many mayors disclose is only a portion of what they actually take home. And in some cases, even mayors whose names don’t appear on the list make over $100,000 of taxpayers’ dollars — because they also get income from their local municipality and the upper-tier municipality (York, Peel, Durham, and Halton regions.) Some also get paid to sit on publicly funded boards, such as local conservation, electricity and police boards. And a handful of GTA mayors still benefit from a provision in the Municipal Act that allows them to declare a third of their income tax-free — and not disclose that portion to the province.As a result, taxpayers looking for answers are left to muddle through various council reports to find out exactly how much their mayors make, and how they compare to others across the GTA.“It’s only when you combine regional remuneration with the local salary can you get an apples-to-apples comparison,” said Steve Parish, the mayor of Ajax, who made $102,700 in 2017, according to the Sunshine List. That number, however, didn’t include the income he made as a member of Durham Regional Council, where he earned an additional $55,000 in 2017. He admits “from a strict transparency point of view, you have to put the numbers together to get the straight goods.”A Star analysis of all GTA mayors found significant discrepancies between what appears on the Sunshine List and what they took home, ranging from a difference of a few hundred dollars to over $100,000. The S ...
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