Council Update: Budget (Mayor’s Office, Staffing)

Mayor’s Office
New this year to budget deliberations, the Mayor’s Office presented as a stand-alone independent department. The Mayor has always been independent, just like everyone on Council. Each of us makes up our own mind on whatever issue is before us. The Office of Mayor, however, was for administrative purposes, located within the CAO’s Department. After the Mayor referenced on CBC that he reports to the CAO, a change was made to make the Mayor’s Office fully autonomous, which means that this year, for the first time, the Mayor’s Office is a standalone budget presentation to Council. That independence means that Council has a higher duty to scrutinize the Office as Council now provides the major oversight.

The Mayor’s Office employs six people and as part of this year’s budget, the Mayor was proposing to add an additional communications employee. Awkwardly, this seventh employee is actually already in place as the hiring was approved by the previous CAO from 2025 CAO department funds. The stipulation given back in August was that, if funds can’t be found in the City Hall budget, Council would need to approve the hire as an over in the 2026/2027 budget. That might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it has aged very poorly given the 2026 budget realities. Having the Mayor’s Office budget grow by 16% at the very same instance that the Mayor and Council are looking for cuts is a really bad look.

This was a very awkward moment for Council. It’s not easy to scrutinize a colleague’s budget. There were questions around the cost of the Mayor’s 2025 State of the City Address ($13,000) and the cost of the outside consultant ($91,000) that helped the Mayor restructure the Office. Having a new Mayor was inevitably going to mean some changes in staffing and structure. Since Mayor Savage has left office, the expenses of the Mayor’s Office has grown by 29%. Of that, 16% is in this year’s budget in form of the extra employee.

The Mayor has spoken often about the 10% tax bill increase that HRM is facing and has indicated that he see’s that increase as too much to ask and, therefore, HRM needs to make significant cuts. He has moved motions and supported lots of cuts, even small stuff like reducing HRM’s contribution agreement with Engage Nova Scotia by $8,000. So it was very hard to square the Mayor’s approach to his own office with his stance on the rest of the budget. It has the feel of austerity is for others, but not for me. The optics are just terrible.

The Mayor indicated that the Mayor’s Office hasn’t grown at the same rate as other municipal departments and that it’s a small part of the overall budget. He’s not wrong in that. The problem is that the same argument can be made about lots of different things that HRM does. There are a bunch of relatively small cuts on the Budget Adjustment List. Heck as Councillor Steele pointed out, what HRM is planning to spend on bike lanes this coming year is less than the Mayor’s total office budget and just look at how much attention that has had! I don’t think we should treat the Mayor’s Office differently and Council should apply the same scrutiny and rigour that we’ve been putting every department through and so I moved a motion to add an option to the Budget Adjustment List to reduce the Mayor’s Office budget by one employee. Council approved my motion 11-5.

It was maybe a very human sort of moment, but the Mayor took Council’s 11-5 vote very personally. His comments quoted in All Nova Scotia after were that some Councillors don’t want him to be mayor and are using the budget to prevent him from doing his job. “Some Councillors are focussed on themselves and on their grievance, rather than on delivering for residents, which is where my focus remains.”

I’m disappointed that this is what the Mayor took away from the review of his budget and my motion. Yes, it was a difficult exercise, but I fail to see how the review of a single employee in an Office of seven, which has grown considerably under Fillmore’s tenure, is in anyway blocking the Mayor from doing his job. Mayor Savage managed very well with 5-6 people. This feels like a nice to have not an absolute need. Council does have a job to do to in scrutinizing each and every budget that comes forward, and that includes the Mayor’s Office. It wasn’t Council that put forward adding staff in a time of financial pressure and it wasn’t Council that went ahead with hiring someone without ongoing funding in place. The Mayor has said frequently that everything is on the table during these budget deliberations. He evidently meant everything, but his own Office.

I don’t think Council would be doing its job or applying the same scrutiny that every other department has received if we had just passed the Mayor’s Office budget without carefully examining it and asking tough questions. I know that was difficult and I really felt uncomfortable moving the motion, but I also felt I wouldn’t be doing my job if I just let it go. It’s disappointing that the Mayor, instead of taking Council’s concerns and feedback to heart, seems to believe that it’s all a personal attack. Not a great Thursday.

Staff Reductions:
As it turned out, Friday wasn’t much better with most of our morning consumed by an out of the blue motion from the Mayor. The Mayor wanted staff to model reductions in HRM compensation costs (i.e. staff) of between 3-7%. The Mayor’s motion excluded police, fire and transit, and would have included

• Cancelling positions or extending vacancy
• Eliminate positions approved, but not yet filled
• End term positions
• Restructure and consolidate HRM’s bureaucracy
• Reduced the number of full-time employees

The Mayor’s motion was almost universally panned by Council because the problems with it were many.

First, excluding police, fire and transit sounds fine until you consider that they’re 55% of HRM’s workforce, meaning that the other departments would see even more dramatic cuts than the motion called for. That includes public facing departments like Parks and Rec, Planning, and Public Works. How the Library might have fit in, if at all, wasn’t clear to me since Library staff aren’t HRM employees, but HRM is the Library’s major funder.

Problem number two is the Mayor seems to want to talk about staff without talking about services. We can’t talk about staff as if they’re separate from services. Services = staff. If the Mayor wants to reduce services, he should be indicating what services he wants to see HRM do less of. Should timelines to mow the grass at ballfields go up, should timelines to fill potholes be extended, should library hours be reduced, should there be fewer Park and Rec programs, should buses be less reliable because we have fewer mechanics on shift, etc. Having discussions like that though puts the actual pain of budget cuts in much starker relief. The impacts on the public become very apparent once you get to the specifics around what will no longer happen! It’s politically easier to talk about staffing at a high level as it avoids those uncomfortable truths… at least for a while.

Problem number three was that the Mayor did next to no homework to prepare the motion. HRM staff were engaged only on a very superficial level and no one on Council was informed until it was moved to the floor. This isn’t how you go about making major change.

The last problem was just how impossible getting any useful results was going to be. What the Mayor was proposing would apply to the current budget year and the next two as well. Staff have two business days before budget documents have to be circulated to Council for March 3’s Budget Adjustment List meeting. If they delayed circulating that part until the last possible moment, they would have five, maybe six days. What the Mayor was asking for here is hugely complicated with major implications and there is no way that anyone would be able to do any kind meaningful analysis or planning for it on 2-5 days notice. If the Mayor’s motion had passed, whatever staff produced would be pretty useless to base any real decisions on. Garbage in, garbage out.

As a result of how flawed and inoperative the Mayor’s motion was, it was roundly defeated by Council 15-2 (Hendsbee and Mayor voting in favour). That might have been the end of the story, just another particularly fractious Council meeting, but in the afternoon, the Mayor’s Office released a statement, part of which I have included here:

We have the opportunity to lower the potential tax bill increase even further by streamlining our administration, eliminating redundancies, and making sure municipal resources are focused on need-to-haves, not want-to-haves.

That’s why I put forward a motion asking staff for more information on reducing municipal wages and compensation costs over the next three years by up to 7%. This would not apply to frontline positions in transit, fire, and police.

Unfortunately, my Council colleagues did not support that motion. 

As a result, it has become clear that holding a flat tax rate this year would instead require significant cuts to core, frontline services residents rely on – transit, fire, and police. And I am not willing to do that.

Let’s call this what it is: the worst kind of politics. The Mayor put forward something that virtually everyone else in the room rightly recognized as poorly thought out, poorly prepared, and completely impossible to do in the available timeline and despite all that overwhelming feedback, the Mayor, evidently, still feels everyone else is wrong. This is deeply unserious governance. Council not accepting this barely half-baked motion isn’t the reason he can’t deliver on the flat-tax rate that he promised during the election. This is just a clumsy attempt to scapegoat Council. If the Mayor wanted a lower potential tax bill, he should have moved more cuts, not shown up at the 11th hour with an idea that was impossible to implement.

Not a good week at City Hall.

The week concluded with Council finishing up our look at the corporate administrative departments and the Library. We turned down the idea of cutting the Library collection, turned down scrapping Living Wage contractor requirements, and opted to continue the bus rapid transit project on Robie Street. We didn’t quite finish looking at Fiscal Services so debate will resume sometime next week before the big examination of everything on the Budget Adjustment List starting on March 3.