Region of Queens Mayor Scott Christian and his fellow councillors at a town hall session at the Liverpool Fire Hall in October. (Rick Conrad / File photo)

A citizens committee is considering recommending significant raises for Queens County’s mayor and councillors.

The five-person group of volunteers appointed by Region of Queens council to review elected officials’ remuneration had their second meeting on Friday.

They agreed that the mayor’s position should be considered a full-time job. They also agreed to recommend that it increase to $68,752 a year from the current $48,033.

That reflects the current salary of the mayor in the West Hants Regional Municipality.

Councillors could see a bigger percentage bump. Committee members discussed how the annual pay for a regional councillor of $24,286 is less than minimum wage, based on a 30-hour work week.

After considering the West Hants councillor rate of $34,376, they discussed raising the salary for a Queens councillor to $41,496. 

Committee members split on that. Three supported the higher rate, while two others voted against it.

Kerry Morash said it would be difficult to justify that kind of increase to residents.

Pamela Brennan said she supports higher pay for councillors, especially in the age of social media.

“We live in a time when elected officials are targets for abuse, targets for frustration,” she said, adding that as an elected official, “potentially, you put your employable future at risk.”

She said that a higher rate of pay could encourage more people to consider running for municipal council. District 6 was the only area that was uncontested in the 2024 election. 

Committee chair Christopher Clarke, also a former mayor, said after the meeting that it’s a balancing act.

“You fall between two stools,” he told QCCR.

“On the one hand, you want to compensate people who run for office properly. And they deserve that. 
On the other hand, you’ve got to be cognizant of the fact that Queens is one of the poorest municipalities in the province. You’ve got to make sure that whatever you do doesn’t add too great a burden on the taxpayer.”

The committee’s Tara Druzina said if the new salaries are recommended by the committee and approved by council, the cost would be the equivalent of an extra $24 a year per taxpayer.

It’s important to note that the committee has not yet decided on its final recommendations to council. It will meet again on Feb. 6 at 2 p.m. in council chambers. That meeting is open to the public.

Committee members are set to discuss the rate of pay for deputy mayor, among other issues.

While they focused on West Hants for much of their discussion Friday, they’re also looking at other municipalities with a similar population or budget size.

“So we’ve been using West Hants as our comparison,” Clarke said. 

“It is a reasonably fair comparison. Population-wise, it’s more, they have more councillors. 
We’ve also been cross-referencing to the Town of Bridgewater, for example, where we’re very comparable in size, number of councillors, budget. We’ve looked at the (Municipality of the County) of Annapolis.”

The committee also briefly discussed pension options for elected officials. Some Nova Scotia municipalities allow their council members to participate in a pension plan. But the committee did not reach a consensus on that issue in their Friday meeting.

Currently, pay for Region of Queens council and the mayor is adjusted after every election. 

Any raises are calculated by using an amount equal to the cumulative percentage of the average salary increase of all region employees over the past four years or by the cumulative consumer price index over the same period, whichever is less. 

The region has had the same policy since 2018.

The Municipality of the District of Lunenburg’s mayor is paid $59,377 a year, while councillors make $29,562. The deputy mayor gets $40,208. Members of council can also participate in a health and dental benefits package and be part of the provincial public service pension plan, which MODL belongs to as an employer.

The committee is due to report back to Region of Queens council by Feb. 28. Councillors will have the final say on how they are compensated.

Committee members are: Christopher Clarke, Velta Vikmanis, Tara Druzina, Kerry Morash and Pamela Brennan.

Two staff members are helping them with research and background. They are Holly McConnell, the region’s director of people and culture, and Alex Wilson, the region’s policy analyst and strategic initiatives co-ordinator.

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

Velta Vikmanis is the new executive director of Liverpool’s Astor Theatre. (Rick Conrad)

Liverpool’s Astor Theatre has a new executive director.

Velta Vikmanis took over the job on Oct. 1, part of a new management team at the historic theatre.

“As a practising artist myself, I know the significance and the importance of the Astor,” she said in an interview Thursday.

“It carries a tremendous history in the community. 
And having had a show here myself, and then having the pleasure of stepping onto the board earlier this year, it just seemed like my skill sets from health-care administration and operations experience really lends itself to what the Astor needs in this moment. And so I was happy to step up and just say, ‘Yeah, I’m willing to give it a go.’”

Lori Smyth, who had been the Astor’s box office manager, will take on a new role as theatre manager.

Joe Lyndon will look after the theatre’s technical needs, including light and sound for shows.

Vikmanis moved to Liverpool with her husband in 2021 and has been actively involved in the community since. She is a volunteer and former board member at QCCR, and a volunteer at Queens Manor. Before she took the job as the Astor’s executive director, she was a member of the Astor Theatre Society board.

She also had an exhibition of her work at the theatre in May 2024.

“Right now, we have a great synergy between the board and the staff here at the Astor, and we’re really hoping to capitalize on that momentum as we move forward, so that we can just continue building and moving the Astor forward into the next decades.”

Katy Hopkins had been the theatre’s manager of operations for many years until she resigned in September.

In a news release announcing Vikmanis’s appointment, chairman Eric Goulden thanked Hopkins for her “dedication and support for the Astor”.

“My first main priority,” Vikmanis says, “is to continue with all of the variety of programming that Katie Hopkins, the previous general manager, had put into place and making sure that all of those artists are honoured, their contracts are honoured and that patrons can continue to come into the theatre uninterrupted.”

Vikmanis said she wants to continue the entertainment mix that the Astor has been offering, from popular tribute band shows to movies to live theatre. And she wants to continue to welcome community groups to use the Astor space, and expand on some of the things happening there now.

She said she wants to explore showing a livestream on the theatre’s big screen of some performances from New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

And she’d like to give new artists more opportunities to exhibit at the Astor.

“I really do feel like I have put my best foot forward in the community. Ever since I arrived here, I’m really committed to being a resource and a support within our community. 
So the relationships that I’ve already established throughout the community, I hope will help and support all that’s going on within the theatre and just further enhance that momentum that we seem to have going right now.”

Goulden also announced on the news release that Easton Goodwin, who has appeared in various Astor productions, has been hired as a theatre staff member.

The Astor is close to launching its new website. And it’s been working with the Region of Queens, which owns the building, to improve the building’s accessibility.

In April, the theatre secured a five-year, $500,000 funding commitment from the J&W Murphy Foundation to help beef up its programs and promotion.

CURRENT ASTOR THEATRE SOCIETY BOARD OF DIRECTORS

• Eric Goulden, Chair
• Lynn Cochrane, Vice-Chair
• Loris Azzano, Treasurer
• Star Donovan, Director
• Patricia Simms, Director
• Dan Williams, Director

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

Listen to the audio version of this story below

Velta Vikmanis’s art exhibit, Chaos to Calm, is on now at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. (Rick Conrad)

As many others did during the pandemic, Velta Vikmanis and her husband were looking to move from the crush of the city to the calm of the country.

“With the pandemic I think everybody kind of did an inventory and reprioritizing of life,” the Liverpool resident says. “And so we were very fortunate that we came to Nova Scotia. Neither one of us had ever been here or visited. We drove around for two and a half months and came across the South Shore and fell in love with it.”

That examination of where you’ve been and where you end up is a central theme of Vikmanis’s art exhibit, now on at the Astor Theatre in Liverpool. 

Chaos to Calm has its official opening with a reception on Friday at 6:30 p.m. It runs for the month of May. 

“Coming from Ontario, from a large metropolitan city of 4.2 million people and constant traffic and people on top of each other to this slower, calmer pace. … The show itself is an opportunity for me to do a kind of retrospective.”

Vikmanis and her husband Peter arrived in Liverpool in November 2021, part of the influx of people who moved to Queens County in the midst and the aftermath of the pandemic.

Before that, they lived in Toronto for 16 years, where Vikmanis worked full time. She pursued her bachelor of fine arts degree in sculpture and installation at OCAD University as a part-time student.

“The show is really a reflection of things I did in the past, things that I did in school and an opportunity for me to get back into a daily practice and reflection of my art,” she says.

“I’ve never been what I consider an artist who makes work for a living. I’ve always done it for myself and if it happens to inspire or spark joy in someone else and they appreciate it and want to purchase it, great. That just buys me more art supplies.”

While Liverpool has served as a respite from the bustle of a bigger city, it also allowed her to rediscover her passion for art. After going to school, working full time and living through a pandemic, Vikmanis says she was burnt out after years of what she calls “forced creativity”.

“It was signing up to do this show that actually forced me to do an assessment, an inventory, catalogue, and actually create new works. Because prior to that, I went through a period of no creativity and just putting it on the shelf.”

When artist Velta Vikmanis moved to Liverpool, she was inspired by Queens County’s beaches. (Rick Conrad)

Vikmanis’s show features an eclectic mix of styles, media and topics. From photography in the Azores or on the beaches of Queens County to painting to sculpture, she says it represents 20 years of work.

The centrepiece of the show is Vestige Echo, her thesis project at OCAD. It is a paper-based sculpture that consists of literal pieces and mementoes of Vikmanis’s life, quilted together and hung in the window. A metronome ticks on the windowsill behind it. 

Her parents had been packing up her childhood home in Minneapolis. They started to send her boxes of her old report cards and other keepsakes they collected over the years.

At the beginning of the pandemic, her father died. And that spurred Vikmanis to go through all of the memorabilia from her parents and from her own collection. 

“It was this whole very strange experience of having to mourn and grieve from afar. So that’s when I started gathering and looking through all the things I had collected.”

She tore everything into smaller pieces, ordered them into boxes by the weight of the paper and stitched them together according to how she picked them up out of each box.

It took her 24 weeks to complete the original eight-by-10-foot installation piece. What’s on exhibit at the Astor is a much smaller, but no less compelling, version.

“It was liberating. Certain things, you put them away and you don’t really ever really pull them back out, do you? So the fact that I was deliberate in looking at every single item, reminiscing about it, but the fact that I could have that moment and that time with that person, with that event, with that lived experience but then pass it along. For the Vestige Echo, hopefully (people) find something in it that triggers something in them.”

“It’s fun to experience it with somebody who has no idea who I am and who these people are and someone who’s present to have that shared memory. It triggers something really fun.”

Vikmanis says she loves finding beauty in the mundane. 

“At the end of the day, I’m still drawn to the ordinary. I”m not somebody who’s very gifted in realism. I can’t paint in a realistic manner. I’ve never been interested in that.”

Vikmanis jokes that since she moved to Liverpool, she’s worked almost everywhere. She now works at Main and Mersey on Main Street, and she volunteers with QCCR on its board of directors. She is also the host of two shows on the station. 

She says she’s looking forward to the opening reception on Friday, to hearing what people think of her work and to meeting other artists from Queens County.

“This is my last stop. I’m not going anywhere. Liverpool is my home now. I love all the people here and getting to know everybody. It’s a great opportunity to meet people and engage with the artist community and to meet folks that I haven’t come across yet. For me, it was that, OK I’ve transitioned, I’ve moved, I’m settled in, I’m truly calm now, so now I need to get back into that practice, and this was that kickstart to get back into that practice of thinking about,, OK what am I going to create next?”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

Listen to the audio version below