City hall will rehire a few experienced temporary staff this summer to help with street repairs, while it will redeploy permanent employees from other departments to handle the rest of those duties.
It is this decision, along with the decision to cut in half the street sealing and capping budget this year, which bothered Coun. Brian Swanson during city council’s May 11 regular meeting. Council had discussed ways to reduce this year’s tax increase to zero per cent to help anyone whom the pandemic had affected. City administration had indicated that reducing specific programs and projects would mitigate revenue losses.
One recommendation included reducing the budget for the sealing and capping program to $92,055 from $184,107.
Council eventually approved an amended 2020 operating budget that eliminated or deferred $703,636 in spending.
Full-time versus part-time jobs
“Job loss attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately hit lower-income temporary part-time people. I would think that that would be modelled in the City of Moose Jaw’s reductions here,” Swanson said.
He was concerned that city hall did not plan to rehire temporary employees with experience in pothole repair and instead planned to redeploy other permanent employees from other departments as a way to save their jobs.
He would have liked to have reviewed the hiring of the last five out-of-scope employees since those positions were not under consideration. He pointed out city hall is disproportionately going after temporary part-time jobs that he believed were critical to the work of the engineering department.
“Cutting the sealing and capping program in half is not what I want to do given the state of our roads,” Swanson said. “I look at the 16-per-cent reduction in the engineering department, and I appreciate the library coming forward with a reduction that’s about 13 per cent … and our other departments at city hall with no impact.
“I think it’s a paradigm issue. Is the function of the City of Moose Jaw to provide employment or service? I fall on the second one. The engineering area is where we do not want to reduce service, or reduce it to less than other areas … .
“The bottom line is, we don’t lose one full-time position even though businesses are looking to close.”
Swanson added that council eliminated capping and sealing — a preventative measure, especially to seal newly paved roads — about 15 years ago and it took him a while to get it back in. Council then dropped it from the budget about seven years ago. It’s back again, but he thought it was unfortunate that city administration wanted to reduce its budget.
City administration talked about cutting the capping and sealing program budget in half, while the acting director of the engineering department said funding for that program had not been entirely spent during the last four years, while capping and sealing has not been done effectively during that same time, said city manager Jim Puffalt. There is a new focus to pursue that program this year and city administration believes it can spend that budget in 2020.
With the redeployment of permanent municipal staff, most employees had worked on roads and drainage and were added to the second utility crew, so they are still skilled and capable, he continued. Furthermore, city administration believes this will be a short-term process.
“We spend a lot of money to train and retain employees. Corporate knowledge is important to most cities and this skeleton staff has kept things running the past eight weeks,” Puffalt added. “Without permanent employees, we would be hard-pressed to do so.”
The next regular council meeting is Monday, May 25.
