City to trim back staff training, travel and conferences

Councillors begin line-by-line review of 2021 municipal budget with a $182K cost saving

City councillors plan to reduce spending on staff training, travel and conferences by 10 per cent in 2021 for a saving of $182,000.

At budget talks on Monday night, councillors started going over the 2021 draft budget line by line to debate removing or adding items.

The draft budget includes $292.2 million for services (which is $5.9 million more than 2020) and $70.7 million for construction and capital spending (which is $13 million more than in 2020, much of it on projects the city had precommitted to carrying out next year).

The draft budget also recommends an all-inclusive tax increase of 2.87 per cent, as well as an increase to all user fees — including a 10 per cent transit fare increase.

The first area where council trimmed the budget on Monday was on training, travel and conventions for city workers (including city councillors) — where $1.82 million in spending had been recommended.

Coun. Andrew Beamer suggested the reduction since many conferences are likely to happen virtually in 2021, so the city would be able to easily decrease that area of spending.

It won’t be a 10 per cent reduction in every city staff department, however: some departments will have greater reductions than others, with the idea of achieving an overall 10 per cent saving.

Mayor Diane Therrien suggested city council will likely be able to afford to reduce its budget in this area further than 10 per cent, for example, because conferences for municipal councillors are all going online this year, which reduces costs for travel and hotel stays.

But she wanted to know more about city departments that may need to receive training to keep up with professional accreditation.

Coun. Kim Zippel said she wanted to ensure that type of training is readily available to city staff; it was mentioned earlier in the discussion that the city is on the hook to pay for this training under some employee contracts.

“We certainly don’t want to hamper

(staff ’s) capabilities or have liability because we’re not keeping up with training,” Zippel said.

The city’s 2021 draft budget recommends an all-inclusive tax increase of 2.87 per cent for 2021, as well as an increase to all user fees — including a transit fare hike of 10 per cent.

Budget talks continue on Tuesday night and continue Wednesday and perhaps Thursday, too.

The budget will be adopted by city council Dec. 14. joelle.kovach@peterboroughdaily.com