Four things Budget 2023 made clear, and the questions it provoked

Budgets are more than a bunch of numbers, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe remarked in the opening to his speech upon the documents’ tabling last Wednesday.

But while the figures in this fiscal framework, the first of the new council, shed light on priorities and pressures facing Ottawa city hall, that illumination only goes so far.

Ahead of the draft budget’s March 1 adoption, here are four things it’s already revealed, and questions that follow in their wake.

There were “efficiencies” to be found at OC Transpo — but what will that mean for transit riders?

After council decided it wanted to freeze transit fares in 2023, in line with a Sutcliffe campaign promise, Cyril Rogers, the city’s acting chief financial officer, and transit GM Renée Amilcar said they would accelerate their work to consider “cost savings, potential efficiencies and realignments.”

What they’ve presented is a plan that involves $47 million in efficiencies this year. A small fraction ($4.4 million in savings) comes from reducing the OC Transpo fleet by 117 buses – matching current service levels—while another $43 million is freed up through a “capital program alignment.” What this actually entails hasn’t been clearly spelled out. Same goes for any impacts it might have on the transit rider experience.

Amilcar promised details would come at the Feb. 9 meeting of council’s transit commission. In the interim, community groups are sounding alarm bells over “massive transit cuts.”

Pat Scrimgeour, director of transit customer systems and planning, told this newspaper via email Tuesday that the city would be reducing its 2023 capital spending on:

• Bus refurbishment (with the fleet losing those 117 buses)

• Bus detours related to Stage 2 LRT construction

• Customer service improvements

• Bus shelters and station improvements

The plan to make recreation more affordable looks different from what Sutcliffe campaigned on — will it satisfy?

Mark Sutcliffe, mayoral candidate version, budgeted $2 million into his campaign-era financial plan to fund a 10 per cent cut to kids’ recreation fees.

Now he’s in office, and that’s not in the draft budget. This isn’t actually a surprise because council endorsed a revised approach back in December. Instead of a 10-per-cent fee cut across the board, staff would instead bring forward options for free or low-cost kids’ activities like skating and swimming or increased recreation subsidies for low-income families.

What the draft budget now proposes is a 10 per cent cut to summer camp fees, costing city coffers $640,000; $250,000 worth of drop-in activities, to be offered free of charge until the end of the year, with a focus on “facilities serving vulnerable communities,” says recreation GM Dan Chenier; and increasing a recreation subsidy for low-income participants from $185 to $222, at a cost of $400,000.

Ultimately, will anyone be fussed about the metamorphosis the mayor’s campaign pledge has undergone, and the final form it’s taken? Stay tuned for the community services committee meeting on the draft budget, scheduled for Feb. 28.

Bill 23 doesn’t feature prominently in Budget ’23 — but is Steve Clark really as good as his word?

Last fall, that was a collective freak-out by cities across Ontario about the projected impacts of provincial housing-supply Bill 23 on municipal finances. The bill proposed to increase housing supply and affordability by forcing municipalities to reduce the charges they levy on developers. After its passage at Queen’s Park, housing minister Steve Clark promised cities would be “kept whole.”

It wasn’t enough to soothe all of Ottawa’s council. At a meeting in December, chief financial officer Cyril Rogers reassured some questioning councillors that the draft budget would contain information about the potential impacts of Bill 23 and “risk mitigations” the city would employ in response.

But in the staff report and presentation that accompanied the budget’s tabling, there was no mention of the legislation that even the city’s then-CFO, now interim city manager, had warned could have “significant impacts on municipal finances.”

Sutcliffe told reporters at a post-budget press conference that the city was counting on Clark to come through on his promise, and “deliver the funding we need to offset any of the shortfalls resulting from Bill 23.”

The mayor had some words of warning in his budget speech about what happens if the province doesn’t: “significant budget pressures in 2024 and beyond.”

Job cuts didn’t materialize at the level they might have — but what will the new plan for a city “service review” mean for the municipal workforce?

The scenario Sutcliffe laid out in his campaign’s financial plan – 100 job cuts through attrition, another 100 through unfilled vacancies – hasn’t come to pass.

In an interview last week, Sutcliffe said there were no positions eliminated for this year’s budget, excluding normal course-of-business decisions by city management, and a senior-leadership initiated “organizational alignment” that led to two departments being merged and one general manager job being declared redundant.

Rogers, the city’s chief financial officer, said job reductions “to save costs” as well as increases “to improve services for residents” were part of the net growth in the municipal workforce, equivalent to 320 full-time employees (FTEs), proposed in the draft budget.

Rogers offered one example of said reductions: 54 FTEs at OC Transpo, “primarily associated with the end of enhanced COVID-19 cleaning and aligning maintenance and rehabilitation work with the current ridership and level of service.” But the transit agency will see a net increase of 112 FTEs in 2023 if the budget is approved.

Meanwhile, the political conversation about city jobs is far from over. Staff, with Sutcliffe’s input, have crafted a framework to review city services on an annual basis, including the potential to have those currently delivered in-house contracted out.

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