The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
• HRM council debates budget changes /
Pushed to the back-burner with the emergence of COVID-19, the climate change crisis reared its foreboding head again Tuesday at a Halifax council budget meeting.
"Trying to do more with what we have," Kelly Denty, director of the planning and development business unit, told council about her reasoning for eliminating three halfyear positions from Halifact 2050, the municipality's longterm climate change mitigation plan.
Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre) made a motion to move the three Halifact staff jobs, coming at a cost of $137,000, over to the budget adjustment list of items that will be voted upon individually for possible addition to the overall budget.
“Eventually, we are all going to go back to work, emissions will go up again and rather than COVID being the pressing crisis of our time, we will be back to climate change in short order because the fundamentals of our civilization are still not sustainable,” Austin said.
“I get the need to control hiring and for vacancies but those three employees for Halifact, this has to be one of our top priorities. To have a small exemption for three employees for that to me seems very reasonable.”
The majority of council agreed with Austin's sentiments and the motion passed 10-5.
Denty said the target reduction for planning and development was $2.24 million or 16 per cent of the department's original net budget of $14.42 million.
Denty said the approach was to maintain core services, reduce expenses and to maximize savings.
Vacancy management accounted for 32 per cent of the department savings, Denty said.
Council continued the task Tuesday of shrinking its 2020-21 operating budget by $85.4 million to meet declining revenues.
The previously forecast billion-dollar operating budget that included expenditures of $832.41 million and a projected gross capital spending of nearly $180 million was deemed way to rich for the municipality. Each of the municipality's 13 business units were directed to cut department budgets, a good portion of the reductions sought coming from nearly $21.7 million in compensation savings to be realized by a hiring freeze and the mid-april announcement to cut 1,480 casual, seasonal and temporary employees.
Another $25 million in savings was to come from capital operating expense cuts reached through cancelled or deferred projects.
The job of shaving anticipated spending department-by-department began Tuesday with the corporate and customer services unit providing a $6.2-million cut from its originally proposed budget of $42.3 million.
Department director Jerry Blackwood told council during its online meeting that his unit is saving $1.7 million in fuel and general building costs.
The hiring freeze and not filling vacant positions has resulted in 17 vacancies in the department and a saving of another $1.7 million. Five new positions listed in the original budget are also on hold.
“One of our assumptions was that parks would remain closed and there was a savings of $200,000 in our budget for the cleaning of the washrooms,” Blackwood said. “Now that parks are open, that is a pressure that we will need to clean those public washrooms.”
Blackwood said the department proposes $20 million in capital spending deferrals and savings that include deferrals of expansions at transit centres and fire station replacements.
The chief administrative office was able to trim $670,000 from a net budget of more than $8 million, legal and legislative services chopped $840,000 from an $8.4-million net budget forecast and finance and asset management clipped $3.76-million, a 9.4 per cent reduction from its original $39,826,000 budget.
Evangeline Colman-sadd, the municipal auditor general, said her office will save $104,000 by not backfilling maternity leaves and by not filling a vacant auditor position until the fourth quarter of the fiscal year.
The office's original operating budget was forecast at $1.13 million.
Police, fire and library services will be presenting recast budget figures Wednesday as budget deliberations continue throughout the week before a final budget is voted on by June 9.