Well, things should be
quite interesting this evening at Thunder Bay City Council as they have their
final budget deliberation meeting. Councillor Mark Bentz has staked out his
position. In remarks reported in
the local media, he is of the position that levy hikes are not sustainable
given that tax levy increases are more than double the consumer price index over
the last decade. In a very stark graph provided in the Chronicle Journal, Councillor
Bentz asserts that since 2011, the tax levy has grown by 32 percent while the
CPI has gone up 14 percent and the assessment base only 7 percent. This is of course a pretty classic interpretation
of sustainability in that the tax levy is growing faster than the tax base
meaning that the tax burden is essentially deepening on ratepayers.
The key question is
what is the solution? Part of the debate this evening is going to be
over the list of items totaling 2 million dollars in cuts that have been
produced by administration as part of getting the levy increase down from about
6 million to about 4 million dollars. Some of
the items mentioned include ending residential weekend snowplowing and closing
the Conservatory and even reducing library hours. It is quite interesting that all of these
proposals entail direct service reductions to current ratepayers. Your taxes will still go up, but you will be
getting less. So there.
The fundamental
problem is that the key expenditure component on the operating budget is wages
and salaries. The total wage and salary bill
functions as a combination of both price and quantity – that is the salary per
employee multiplied by the number of employees.
These are ultimately the items that also need to be addressed. It can probably start with a hiring freeze
given that despite a flat economy and a population total that has not budged in
20 years, there are more employees on the municipal payroll than there were 20
years ago.
If one looks at the accompanying
graph, one can see that since 1999, the number of employees of the City of
Thunder has grown. The actual number of
FTEs (Full time Equivalent positions) rose from approximately 1,568 positions
in 1999 to 1,840 in 2009 but by 2019 had declined to 1,715 and are now
scheduled to rise to 1,724 in the 2020 budget.
The dip between 2009 and 2019 is the result of the City getting out of
some of its homes for the aged obligations in 2016 so the pre-2016 figures
includes more staffing for homes for the aged.
The other thing is that these total FTEs actually do not include police
which in 2016 were an additional 333 FTEs.
It is possible to estimate an adjustment that removes homes for the aged
staff prior to 2016 but adds police and the results show a steady increase and flattening
out of employment.
Between 1999 and 2019,
employment as measured by these “estimated” adjusted FTE numbers may have grown
from 1,642 to 2,040 – an increase of 24 percent. Given that population in the City of Thunder
Bay has been flat over the same period, the per capita numbers of municipal
employees has grown substantially. There
may indeed be very good reasons why this has been the case but it needs to be
discussed. At minimum, a hiring freeze
is not an unreasonable thing to do while numbers like this are discussed. More to the point, perhaps Councillor Bentz
can actually get the numbers from 2011 to 2020 on employment from
administration given that in the end my numbers are only “estimates” as such
data is not easily obtainable. I would
be interested in seeing the resulting charts.