Brampton council embarks on long road to financial redemption

TheGlobeAndMail.com
April 3, 2015
Sahar Fatima

As Brampton council moves to rein in the city’s ballooning payroll costs, the auditor who sounded the alarm says it will take a few years to determine how effective the efforts will be.

Councillors voted on Monday to freeze their own salaries indefinitely. A week earlier, Mayor Linda Jeffrey chaired a budget subcommittee that pushed forward with proposed wage freezes for non-unionized staff, ignoring a city staff report that argued against the freeze and instead recommended council consider pay hikes. Later the same day, Brampton announced its top bureaucrat was no longer employed by the city.
 
Jim McCarter, appointed by council to review the city’s finances, reported in January that payroll made up two-thirds of Brampton’s soaring operating costs. He said it is too early to tell whether the city’s response to his “financial storm” warning is adequate.

“The proof will be in the pudding,” Mr. McCarter said. “Plans are one thing but it’s really the results that will tell the tale, and that will probably take a year or two down the road.”

Close to 75 per cent of city staff are unionized, which limits the city’s ability to cut costs in the short run as head counts and wage increases are built into collective agreements.

“You do need people to deliver public services but you have to manage the growth of those expenditures,” Mr. McCarter said. Payroll costs grew about 120 per cent over the past decade, as did property-tax revenue. Over that same time, the city’s population has grown 39 per cent.

Meanwhile, Ontario’s annual “Sunshine List” released in late March showed 435 City of Brampton employees made more than $100,000 in 2014, up from 315 in 2013.

Council directed staff in February to report back on a potential wage freeze. Instead, the report received last week argued a wage freeze would hurt Brampton’s competitiveness in attracting and retaining talent. Signed by interim chief administrative officer John Corbett, the report recommended increasing non-unionized workers’ pay in line with a cost-of-living adjustment, which has been approved in other Peel municipalities, and also advised that council consider merit-based salary hikes.

The budget subcommittee did not accept those recommendations and moved motions to impose a wage freeze on all non-union workers at management level or higher. Councillors also directed the senior bureaucracy to report back with a plan to reduce the non-union administration 12 per cent by 2017. Both moves are subject to approval by city council.

Council discussed Mr. Corbett’s future with the city in a closed-door meeting later the same day and the announcement of his departure was made shortly afterward.

A 30-year veteran at the city, Mr. Corbett retired as CAO in January but continued as interim CAO as the city searched for a replacement. Other senior staff will fill in as acting CAO on a rotational basis for the next few months.

Ms. Jeffrey has clashed with Mr. Corbett in the past and questioned the accuracy of city staff reports on Brampton’s financial health. Elected on a promise to clean house and bring more accountability to city hall, Ms. Jeffrey inherited a bureaucracy that played a role in some of her predecessor’s scandals.

Some staff still employed by the city used public funds to buy tickets to former mayor Susan Fennell’s annual charity gala, while others are being investigated by Brampton’s interim auditor-general for allegedly withholding key information surrounding a lucrative downtown development deal.

Mr. Corbett’s exit wasn’t the only signal of a break from the previous administration toward a new era that Ms. Jeffrey is trying to establish at city hall. It was Ms. Jeffrey’s proposal to freeze councillors’ salaries and eliminate their one-third tax-free salary benefit. Slashing her own salary by more than $50,000 was among her first moves as mayor.

“I believe it is important to show leadership,” Ms. Jeffrey said in a news release announcing the proposed councillor salary freeze. “This will set the tone for future discussions while at the same time demonstrating to city staff that we won’t ask them to do something that we ourselves wouldn’t participate in.”