Draft budget would add city jobs, but official notes downsizing trend

A four-year trend of reducing city hall’s workforce would end if council adds the equivalent of about 82 full-time positions to the municipal public service in 2018.

City manager Steve Kanellakos said none of the proposed hires is being recommended to backfill positions he cut after becoming the top bureaucrat in February 2016.

The city is already seeing savings from the removal of those 177 positions, Kanellakos said Thursday. The proposed new hirings in 2018 are largely tpre-gamefy the needs of a growing city, he said.

Kanellakos said he wouldn’t ask for more workers unless he knows for certain that the city is running as efficiently as possible.

“I never like asking for more money for more people. It’s just a fundamental principle of mine,” Kanellakos said. “I don’t feel it’s fair to go to council and say, ‘Give me more people,’ when someone, or the auditor, is saying to me, ‘Yeah, but you’re wasting money over here, you’re wasting resources over here.’ ”

The city tracks staff levels by measuring the number of full-time equivalent positions, or FTEs. The actual head count is higher since part-time positions make up one FTE.

As of Sept. 30, there were 19,017 people working for the corporation, plus 484 volunteer firefighters. The draft 2018 budget calls for 15,090.59 FTEs, compared to the 15,008.16 identified in the 2017 budget.

Along with 23 more police officers, the city plans to add 14 paramedics, plus 28 FTEs in children’s services, 10 FTEs in community recreation, and eight FTEs in aquatics programs, along with a handful of other FTEs spread across parks, facilities, fleet services and the Ottawa Public Library. There has been a reduction in FTEs in economic development and long-range planning.

According to the draft budget, the net result would be 82.43 FTEs added to the municipal public service.

Kanellakos defended the proposed staff increases by pointing to the reduction of FTEs over the course of the council term.

According to the city’s calculations, there would be 4.52 fewer FTEs in 2018 compared to the beginning of the term in 2014.

The downsizing statistics are thrown off by the annual additions to the Ottawa Police Service.

Not including arm’s-length boards like police, transit, library and public health, regular tax-supported city services are down 36.93 FTEs since the start of the term. FTEs supported by the water and sewer rate budget are down 50.46.

“You can look at one individual year where FTEs are up. More than half of them are either provincially funded or federally funded, or they’re police or they’re for new facilities, like François Dupuis (recreation centre),” Kanellakos said.

He said there are only a few new FTEs in the draft 2018 budget that aren’t responding to growth, new facilities or program expansions funded by upper levels of government.

Revenue generated by programs in new city facilities also offsets the cost of new hires, he said.

Kanellakos said he doesn’t think the city is at the point of needing to grow the workforce even more to maintain service standards.

“That is going to be the challenge as we go forward,” he said. “My perspective always is, I never want to ask for more people until I’m sure we’re actually running efficient.”

One major change not captured by the workforce data in the draft 2018 budget is OC Transpo’s shift from crosstown bus operations to LRT operations. Transpo has planned to lay off hundreds of bus drivers when the Confederation Line LRT opens, but its draft budget isn’t showing a change in FTEs for 2018.

Kanellakos said Transpo in the new year will bring more information about staffing to the transit commission.