Surrey County Council (SCC) is to pay someone nearly £100,000-a-year to help manage its move away from its Kingston base .
The local authority wants to hire a programme manager to help with moving its headquarters out of the town and has advertised the position with an £91-98,000 salary.
The description for the two-year post states it is a "unique and historic opportunity to help the council move into Surrey and a new era".
Work includes IT and digital, new ways of working, property disposal and refurbishment, HR policies and procedures, and communications and stakeholder engagement.
The advert, posted 13 days ago, sparked a call for high-paying salaries of council officers to be "more transparent", but that has since been voted down by councillors.
Cllr Chris Botten, opposition leader, said the county should be sharing talented staff and resources with borough and district councils in a bid to keep down costs when so many residents are struggling to make ends meet.
He put forward a motion at SCC full council on Tuesday (March 19) for a policy on recruiting permanent positions instead of interim posts and for the county to work more with the boroughs and districts. This was approved and voted through unanimously.
A third part of the motion to provide more monitoring of the costs for senior management salaries, interim appointments and redundancies at the people, performance and development committee (PPDC), was rejected in the vote with only 17 for, compared with 52 against.
Addressing councillors in the chamber Cllr Botten said: “There are people out there who are spending their lives fighting for special needs packages for their children. There are people out there using foodbanks and for whom the council tax increase, which has just been landing on their doorstep, was a step too far.
“The county council needs to get its house in order in employing in a cost effective way and in a proper and appropriate fashion and one our residents can have confidence in.”
He said they should be growing talent with the other councils and within the public sector adding there were other local authorities where officers have shared posts between county and districts.
He added: “Our families out there are very clear that having gone on and on and on about Surrey’s lack of money over the last 10 years it really strikes a discordant note to see salaries of this sort advertised.”
Cllr Eber Kington said there needed to be more transparency over the salaries being paid.
He said: “Monitoring the decision and spend of officers is very much our role even when that officer with the responsibility is the chief executive.”
Council leader Tim Oliver said there was enough monitoring with the PPDC and that it was up to chief executive Joanna Killian how the budget for salaries was spent and “for her to decide what she needs at what point”.
He said: “I agree completely we need to move as quickly as possible to a robust permanent workforce. But the reality is there are challenges in recruiting the right people and we need to move at pace.”
SCC pay and terms and conditions are determined by the PPDC including the remuneration of chief officers and deputy chief officers.
The minimum salary for council staff works out at £16,894 or £9 per hour and the highest basic salary is £220,000.
The council publishes details of salaries paid to senior staff every year and covers positions with annual salaries of £50,000 or more.
