Tighten Your Belt, Mark Sutcliffe: PATTON

I’ve been watching the growth in city hall staff which dwarfs the police in numbers. I think around 100 a year increase. The city designs programs which increase the staff permanently – think about the house occupancy program – probably hired 10, maybe 15 people. With overheads, each employee roughly costs $200,000 a year, so the program is probably costing more in salary and pension than what is being brought in. Watch the garbage changes, probably another 30 bylaw and garbage “educators” on top of that, plus the staff to administrate the tag system. Probably 40+ people, or $8,000,000 a year forever. It’s super hard to undo these programs which means when the downsize due to the eventual realities of the economy, not sure how they will accomplish this except across the board percentage reductions?

Council is about to find out what happens when you build your budget on the premise that someone else is going to pay your bills for you. It would be more than naive to imagine that the City has a Plan B ready to go to balance the budget without provincial dollars. They’ll find out next month if they also need to rejig things when the feds don’t send piles of money their way either.

The day of reckoning is about to be upon us and they better get their pencils sharpened because they are soon to be against a tall and wide wall with few escape routes. There are very few reserve fund dollars left any more to use to shore up a budget that was based on fantasy. It will be interesting to see where they turn to cover any shortfall. Just as well they ended 2023 in a surplus position instead of the deficit they’d been forecasting. Maybe there’ll be an Easter Miracle that will pour money into the City’s coffers in time to avert disaster. Or maybe they’ll have to do the responsible budgeting that they avoided last fall.