Details have emerged on the municipal layoffs happening at the City of North Battleford.
The reduction of staff and positions are “distributed across the organization” according to City Manager Randy Patrick. It includes out-of-scope, CUPE, community safety officers and fire, he said.
They are also looking for other efficiencies throughout the organization but “staffing levels had to be impacted,” said Patrick.
The process has started now at the union level and will continue for the next three or four weeks. Patrick noted that some union staff have bumping rights.
In terms of how many staff will be lost, an exact number is not being provided at the moment. In terms of dollars, Mayor Ryan Bater said the reduction is almost $1.4 million in salaries, which is a 10.5 per cent reduction in staffing costs.
In terms of the distribution, about $300,000 is being reduced in management, $650,000 in CUPE positions, almost $400,000 in firefighter positions and $85,000 in CSOs.
There are no details yet on which positions are lost. Bater acknowledged some service disruptions but said those would be as minimal as possible.
Bater said staff reductions “was not something we took lightly at all. This was a very difficult decision to make but a necessary one to make to ensure the financial health of the city and that we are spending within our means.”
He noted that the process of putting North Battleford on a solid financial footing had started quite some time ago.
“Last year we had a lot of changes with the executive management team,” said Bater, “and council had charged that team with getting us on that solid financial footing. We were able to identify a number of efficiencies then, but we also had tasked admistration with finding more efficiencies through the year 2019.”
Finding efficiencies had been a major focus of budget discussions, with administration making a commitment to reduce operational costs by $500,000 throughout 2019.
Since then there have been other financial pressures placed on the city, Bater noted.
One ongoing issue has been the land sales situation in Killdeer and Fairview. There were no lots sold at all last year from the city’s inventory, and the city was forced to introduce discounts on prices this year to try to get land sales moving.
A second concern was the loss of long-term service agreements with other jurisdictions.
In particular, Bater pointed to the loss of fire service contracts. The RM of North Battleford parted ways with North Battleford fire department this year after their contract expired, and have now established their own volunteer fire department.
When asked by reporters if that directly impacted this decision, Bater replied, “Yes, it did.”
Bater also noted the city lost fire service agreements with the provincial government for Saskatchewan Hospital and for the Battlefords District Care Centre.
Finally, the city has taken a major hit to their commercial assessments. Bater explained some of those were appealed and those appeals were successful, resulting in a loss of revenue to the city of some $800,000.
“All these things combined just kept adding up,” said Bater. “We kept trying to manage them individually but when you look at the total amount of financial loss to the city… we were in a position where we had to make this decision.”
