Marlene Usher is the CEO of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation. She makes $200,000 a year. $100,000 of it is paid by the CBRM with the other half fronted by her former employers ACOA.

Her sister, Marie Walsh, is the Chief Financial Officer of the CBRM. She earns over $154,000 a year.

I am interested in accountability and perspective. These are public funds, and are therefore subject to public scrutiny. We, the taxpayers, pay for both of these roles.

By the way, if you would like to see what many of the top internal CBRM staff earn per year, here is the history of CBRM salaries. The top earner is the CAO, Michael Merritt, who we pay $185,267 per year (as of 2016).

Earning the Salary Versus "Keeping" the Salary?

Of these two roles, I believe Marie Walsh is absolutely essential.

She has been the Finance Director of the CBRM since 2007. She is an almost irreplaceable source of knowledge. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that she would be a qualified and leading candidate as a future mayor of the CBRM. Keep that under your hat for future discussion.

However, let us ignore the total salary for the moment.

The anomaly worthy of closer scrutiny is less so about the very high annual salaries, and more so about how these high salaries are maintained after changes in role.

In the case of Walsh, her change in role is arguably just a title change. She transitioned from Finance Director to Chief Financial Officer after a brief stint as interim CAO.

Despite her being the most qualified for the CAO role in the CBRM, headhunters apparently rejected her interest in favor of bringing in Michael Merritt. Councillor Bruckschwaiger said he considered it a "slap in the face" to Walsh at the time.

In the Cape Breton post article (Sept. 23, 2014), reporter Chris Shannon wrote that Walsh said "many of her duties would not change". With her own admission, it might turn out to be challenging to describe how Walsh's role was changed significantly by upgrading her title to CFO.

Nonetheless, her salary jumped by just under $40,000 in a single year as she fulfilled the interim CAO role, and then transitioned to back to her Finance role with a slightly modified title. Given the fact that CAO Merritt now makes over $185,000 per year, we could imagine Walsh's interim appointment to that role might involve a pay raise by title change alone.

What should be interesting to taxpayers is how after CAO Merritt displaced her from the role, her salary did not return to the $107,438 range she earned as Finance Director. Instead, it jumped an additional $7873 over the next two years.

When Walsh left the interim CAO role, her salary stayed with her. If we believe that the differences in roles from Finance Director to Chief Financial Officer are unlikely to be significant, she effectively gained a $40,000 raise in a single year and kept it.

That's more than many people in Cape Breton make in a year, and certainly much more than the parents of the one third of Cape Breton children who live in poverty.

What About Usher's Salary?

Marlene Usher was handpicked by Cecil Clarke to act as the CEO of the new Port of Sydney Development Corporation. Her salary was set to $200,000 per year. Half is paid by CBRM taxpayers; and the other half is paid by ACOA. The port authority itself cannot pay its expenses, is in arrears to the CBRM on its leasing payments, and cannot pay the CEO's salary.

Unlike her sister Marie Walsh, who is certainly fully qualified to fulfill the role of CFO for the CBRM, Usher was a government executive, but has no known port development experience.

One asset Usher did have was a connection with only one level of separation from Cecil Clarke. After his loss to MP Mark Eyking in his bid to head to Ottawa, he was briefly awarded $135,000 per year in a contract to consult to the Cape Breton County Economic Development Agency (CBCEDA) lead by Eileen Lannon Olford.

By the way, Olford is now the head of Business Cape Breton, an agency well taken care of by Mayor Cecil Clarke and the CBRM.

The $135,000 for Clarke's consulting position was paid for by Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation (now absorbed by ACOA), where Marlene Usher was a top ranking executive in the top tier with John Lynn.

As the CBC reported in 2014, John Lynn was "fired for patronage hiring", described as "four people with ties to the Conservative Party".

[ Brief interlude: Mark Bettens, Christina Lamey]

For now, let's abandon any question of political appointments and any possible quid pro quo scenarios worthy of investigation due to all these entanglements.

Here is where the salary question jumps into a scenario worthy of even more scrutiny:

Presuming that Usher had significant port development experience justifying a taxpayer funded position of $200,000 per year, we must remember that her scope of responsibilities recently changed.

As Mayor Clarke entered his second term as the CBRM mayor he was under the gun, and answer to why he hadn't put a new port board in place, and why he was avoiding transparency.

In brief, he stacked the board with himself and his handpicked (and most obedient) collection of councillors, and did such things opposed to transparency as setting records for in-camera (aka private) meetings, withholding reports (McNeil consultant report, pessimistic about container port business case), and imposing a charge of over $43,000 for an access to information request, effectively deterring the public from getting access to info that taxpayers have a right to obtain.

Just before a (long overdue) new board had to be put in place that didn't consist solely of Clarke's "yes men", he took the container port development away from the Port of Sydney Development Corporation.

What that means is that Usher's position becomes essentially redundant.

The port already has redundant management. The second berth has secured funding from three levels of government, and Bernadette McNeil is the fully capable executive who already fully manages the cruise business.

If it's debateable if Usher was ever qualified to take on a port development role, and the largest component of port development she was in charge of has been removed, the next question is fairly obvious:

Why are we still paying her $200,000 a year in taxpayer funding?

Both of these sisters have shown an incredible ability to pull down some of Cape Breton's most elite level salaries.

And both are showing an impressive ability to hold on to those salaries even after their roles are downgraded.

For Usher, the port development activities she was supposed to be leading, have been stripped away from her.

For Walsh, though fully qualified to have been our CAO all along, when she left that interim role, her over $40,000 pay raise in a single year stayed with her.

Perhaps that was a convenient way to apologize for the metaphorical "slap in the face" Councillor Bruckschwaiger suggested she was given when Mayor Clarke and the CBRM council voted to choose someone else for the CAO role she wanted.

Between Walsh, Usher, and Merritt, the taxpayers are shelling out $539,000 per year.

If you add in Clarke's hand picked, personal assistants with Lamey and Bettens, you can add another $75,000 and $81,500 (as of 2012 with four years worth of raises), bringing us up to a total of around $700,000 per year.

Meanwhile, the only one of this group that appears to be an essential asset to the CBRM is Marie Walsh.

So I guess I have one final question for perspective:

Remind me again why we can't afford heavy garbage pickup and we're forced to pull money out of the community sustainability fund to hand over to CBRM preferred agencies like Business Cape Breton?

The executive payroll for Cecil Clarke's inner circle certainly doesn't give the impression that we're living in a municipality where one third of our children are living in households with poverty levels of income.

NOTE: The views expressed above are my own and do not represent lokol (goCapeBreton.com). Read more