HRM cutting nearly 1,500 positions

The Halifax Regional Municipality workforce is taking a direct COVID-19 hit.

“We have made the decision to reduce budgeted staffing levels by approximately 1,480 persons,” Jacques Dube, chief administrative officer of the municipality, said Wednesday in an online update.

“These casual, seasonal and temporary employees who normally provide service to the public cannot due to the pandemic,” Dube said. “This number includes more than 500 seasonal employees who are not currently employed but can no longer be hired this spring or summer as planned, including seasonal recreational staff.”

Dube said the impact will be about $15 million that the municipality does not pay out for unfilled positions.

Effective Tuesday, the municipality instituted a hiring freeze in an effort to minimize layoffs.

“We are committed to our staff and layoffs is not a decision we take lightly,” Dube said. “There have been no permanent employees at this point who have been laid off. I can’t guarantee that won’t happen, nor can I guarantee

that it will happen. We are assessing it daily.”

The bulk of the 1,480 laid off staff work in the parks and recreation department and are seasonal and temporary, Dube said. Summer recreation programs and summer camps had already been cancelled and much of the parks and rec employment disappeared along with the programs.

“We can't continue to pay people for work that isn't being done,” Mayor Mike Savage said. “There is no joy in that, it's simply a fact.”

The mayor said there is a continual realignment of employees.

The municipality employs more than 4,000 people, including 3,755 full-time permanent and term workers and 393 permanent and term part-time workers.

At Tuesday's virtual meeting, regional council unanimously approved short-term financial relief measures for residents and businesses that focused on a deferral until June 1 of the interim property tax bills due April 30.

Eighty-two per cent of municipal revenues come from the collection of residential and commercial property tax and operating expenses total about $100 million per month, Dube said.

“While the municipality is financially sound, a significant amount of cash flow is required to provide services, pay vendors and suppliers and continue with capital projects to support the economy,” Dube said.

Savage said the muchneeded tax deferral relief is directly related to staff reductions.

“The decisions that have been made in terms of not bringing back contractors, term employees and seasonal workers is not something any of us enjoy or relish and we hope ... that we can rehire them and that they can be back to work as soon as possible,” Savage said.

“The fact is that we get our money from property tax and the rest of it, the 18 per cent, we are no longer collecting,” he said, alluding to the cancellation of transit fares, the suspension of parking fees and lost fees for cancelled recreation programs.

“I again stress that municipalities are not like other orders of government. We do not have the ability to rack up large sums of debt. Less than 10 per cent of all your taxes go to municipal government but we pay for the police, fire, the people who pick up the garbage and we pay for those who are operating our buses as well as the many other services. We have to make decisions in the best interest of all our residents and businesses.”

Savage said the property tax deferral is a short-term solution and that the municipality is working with the provincial and federal government for longer-term answers for HRM and its residents.

“I would encourage you, I would call upon your sense of duty, if you can pay your taxes, pay your taxes,” Savage said. “We do need the money. We have a limited amount of cash and we need to pay those important resources, those supports we provide to the community.

“If we defer everybody's property tax, we have no money coming and we'd be laying off everybody, including essential services. Our position is at the present time as strong as it can be. But we certainly don't have the financial capacity to maintain the services that we need to.”

Savage said he didn't mean to sound like an alarmist but he was being realistic. He referred to a headline that suggested the municipality of Vancouver was at risk of going bankrupt.

“I don't think we are at risk of going bankrupt in the short-term, but we are not like other orders of government,” Savage said. “We don't have the ability to borrow unlimited amounts of money and pay it off.”

A recast 2020-21 municipal operating budget will come before council by May 19, providing a more complete financial picture. It is expected that each business unit will be asked to tighten the purse strings.

Budget presentations delivered before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis had parks and recreation employing 472 full- and part-time workers for the 2020-21 fiscal year. The department had budgeted $44 million for operating expenses, with a plan to recoup $15 million in fees and other revenues.

Halifax Transit had offered a budgetary plan for $118 million in operating expenses, $32 million of which was to be offset by fare revenues and area tax rate revenues. Transit was to employ 1,046 workers.

Transportation and public works was to operate on a $105.5-million budget and employ 351 people.

Halifax Regional Police was to spend more than $100 million on its operating budget while employing 806 full- and part-time workers, including 532 sworn police officers. Halifax Fire and Emergency had budgeted $74 million for operating with 536 personnel.

The annual workforce report from 2017-18, the last one available, had the municipality budgeting about $368 million for total compensation costs.

Eighty-two per cent of the municipal workforce is unionized and are represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Halifax Regional Police Association, the International Association of Fire Fighters, the Nova Scotia Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

“We are looking at all of our employees and my objective is to keep everyone employed to the extent possible,” Dube said of the recast budget.

“Any further necessary layoffs would be temporary with the intent to bring them back to work when things, service levels, return to normal.”