The old saying goes “a penny for your thoughts,” but when it comes to engaging the homeless population in Victoria – it’s more like $20 for an opinion.

A public meeting Wednesday on homelessness in Victoria is being heralded as a success, but some critics are taking issue with the city’s decision to pay each homeless person who attended.

Nearly 500 people, many of them homeless, crammed the city’s conference centre to discuss possible solutions to the longstanding issue for a total cost of more than $7,000, the city said.

But one tax watchdog accused the city of wasting money on the pricey payout.

“This is a really bizarre story, and something I think taxpayers should be very uncomfortable with,” said Jordan Bateman, spokesman for the Canadian Federation of Taxpayers.

“This whole situation’s arisen because there are people camping in parks,” he added. “We know where they are. We could go and get this expert advice from them for free. We don’t need to incent them to come to a meeting to do that.”

But Helps stood by the decision to pay attendees, saying the city regularly pays for consultants – sometimes much more.

“We pay consultants all the time, and usually the consultants charge us way more than $20 for their time,” she said. “So just think of it as these folks came out, they gave us their expert experience. They’re consultants, and it’s the cheapest consulting the city has ever engaged.”

The attendance incentive was the idea of Don Evans, the executive director of Our Place Society, who said he knew what it would take to get meaningful input.

“A lot of the people who were there came for the incentive, but they stayed and gave their thoughts. They offered ideas to help and the problem,” he said.

Helps said the meeting itself was productive, sparking dozens of new ideas to help house an estimated 366 people living in the city without a home.

The meeting came about as the result of a controversial proposal to construct a tent city in Topaz Park earlier this year.

Hundreds of residents were fierce in their opposition to the plan and complained that they weren’t consulted enough, prompting Helps and council to go back to the drawing board.

City council will review the ideas from Thursday at a meeting in October.

With a report from CTV Vancouver Island's Scott Cunningham