Sheesh.
The B.C. government's recent budget that stated it was downloading MSP premiums onto employers based on payroll led to some interesting news inconsistencies.
A local radio's website reported Vernon Mayor Mund stated the downloading of health premiums would lead to a new cost of $448,000. for Vernon.
Then tonight, on CHBC-TV news, Kelowna's Mayor Basran said the health premium downloading onto employers would cost Kelowna about $225,000. annually. (As of blog publish, CHBC-TV website hadn't yet loaded the mayor's comments from tonight's 6 p.m. news).
Okay...okay.
Since there are no easily accessible payroll numbers, let's just use population...
Vernon's population is about 59,000.
Kelowna's population is about 195,000.
Presumably Kelowna's staff would number in the area of three times those of Vernon, based on population alone.
Again, presumably, there would perhaps be up to three times the number of bureaucrats to administer Kelowna than Vernon's administration.
So is Mayor Basran incorrect about his numbers?
Or is Mayor Mund wrong about his numbers for Vernon?
"It's more likely that the story writer(s) didn't do enough research," Kia would've offered.
Or maybe Kelowna's--or Vernon's--bureaucrats keep their mayors in the dark?
One would think both mayors would have a reliable source within their own departments!
Somebody's wrong, somewhere!
Apart from the everyday atrocious spelling and grammatical errors in the local media.
Atrocious spelling, every day indeed!
ReplyDeleteNumbers from annual reports on municipal websites:
- 2016 payroll for Vernon $26 million, Kelowna $77 million
- 2016 population for Vernon 40,116, Kelowna 127,500
You correctly estimated Kelowna = 3X Vernon.
New payroll tax is 1.95%.
Conclusion: Mayor Mund is better informed than Mayor Basran (and/or better at arithmetic).