The staffing of any mid to large level corporation is always going to be a balancing act between what’s needed and what’s affordable, and unfortunately, those two factors are rarely in synchronicity with one another.
So there’s always going to come a time when the two need to be resolved with respect to one another. And in Renfrew, that time may well be now.
If my information is anywhere close to being correct, the Town of Renfrew took on close to, if not slightly over, $1 million in additional staff salaries over the past calendar year. It’s hard to root this information out of the budget spreadsheets because all salary information is department-specific, and there seems to be no global information regarding wages and overtime. In short, they make you work for it. But in two departments alone, there appeared to be a significant increase in budgeted salary for 2025 over 2024. Public Works and Community & Recreation Services and Library together posted budget asks that together totalled over $1 million by themselves as compared to 2024. Unless I’m reading the spreadsheet incorrectly, which is entirely possible.
And when you go through the staff roster, you see an awful lot of deputy-this and assistant-that. And when you look at the job titles, you get a sense that things, in some places, are potentially seriously out of hand. I’ve never encountered a jurisdiction with job titles that take ten minutes to say, and adding the word deputy or assistant doesn’t do much to make them any easier to say or remember.
For a municipal council struggling with an inherited debt load that they added to themselves, the reckoning comes when budgets for the upcoming year need to be hammered out, except instead of hammering nails, they’re being forced to pull them out.
Lots of things can and will face the axe, some of those things too much of a luxury to continue with in the current environment, and others nothing short of painful to lose.
When we need to talk about keeping the iconic McDougall Museum open or closing it, even if it’s just in the short term then we know the situation is dire.
Certainly, as part of this process, as part of any mature notion of due diligence, staff salaries need to be looked at and examined with a view as to how necessary certain positions may be. That’s a tough thing to say because I’m talking about somebody’s job here, or a group of somebodies potentially, and that’s something I’m never going to take lightly. If I’m to be known for anything in this discussion, I’d rather go down as a job-creator than a job-killer.
Nevertheless, tough times make for tough decisions, and at the very least, I can take some small measure of comfort in the fact that I have none of these painful decisions to make. It’s one thing to chop paper clips and staplers and postage stamps, but it’s another to chop the person behind those things.
One thing that keeps coming to my attention is this idea that senior managers receive additional pay dependant upon the number of employees working under them. I’ve had this notion provided to me by people of great credibility, but I’ve also had it refuted by someone else with an equal degree of credibility. I suppose one could simply ask somebody “official” about this alleged practice, but that’s a big black hole of nothing from which no light escapes. This is especially so if the answer to the question reveals what may be an embarrassing situation, one with names attached, and understandably nobody wants their name attached to anything.
But it’s a valid question, and better yet, a simple one. Does this situation exist or not?
If it does, upon what is it based? Where was this precedent set, and when was it adopted here, and by whom? And in the face of everything, how could it be allowed to continue? And if it does exist, could there be any linkage to such a policy and the ballooning number of staff hired at Fort Renfrew, despite being the heart of a municipality that’s not grown, and the population number on the sign coming into town showing the same number for three decades. And that number might be over-representing the population. In other words, a community getting smaller while its municipal workforce gets larger. It comes across as a bit counter-intuitive.
I’ve heard from several sources that the head of the BIA — Business Improvement Area — was folded into the town salary structure, meaning that rather than have that position paid for by the existing BIA budget, the town swooped in and hired this person as a member of the Renfrew staff proper, and from what I understand, at a hit of close to $70,000 annually plus benefits. Yet the BIA still doesn’t have enough money for what they’re all about, and are recently involved in an effort to expand their boundaries so as to improve their tax levy.
So how is it that a BIA executive member gets hired as a member of Renfrew town staff? I suppose one could argue that there’s a certain synergy between what the BIA sets out to do and what the town would like to see happen. And so this argument would suggest that there’s a pretty solid overlap between the two positions, so why not just take the BIA spot and fold it into the town salary structure, and alleviate some of the financial pressure the BIA is facing with its own self-defined mandate? What could be wrong with that?
First, the BIA is not part of the municipality’s staff organizational chart. It’s a business group that’s banded together to enhance the business community here in town, but in reality, an organization that caters to the needs of Renfrew’s downtown core, Raglan Street. It’s made up of volunteers, and an executive, including a director, is chosen from within their ranks by their membership. Nowhere in that is the expectation or even thought of the director getting hired on formally by the municipality. Added to that is that lingering smell of conflict of interest, but that’s nothing new in Renfrew, from the look of things both past and present.
I suppose, right now, that person would be BIA Executive-Director Wanda Brydges-Kennell, who, in all honesty, has the impressive type of resume needed for someone tasked with improving the business environment in town. But that said, nowhere is it said that she has to be paid by the municipality as a member of municipal staff. Also, back to that pesky question about supervisors getting more cash for more employees serving under them, who would benefit from this? I believe she was hired by former CAO Rob Tremblay, but he’s gone. Would this then apply to the current CAO’s salary? Or the director of the department Brydges-Kennell belongs to?
My goodness, if this principle is in place and actually exists, then we have what has the appearance of our very own local Ponzi scheme where the guy up top gets paid every time somebody joins in at the bottom. And as a local councillor, I’d not be terribly interested in staff bleating that this is an “industry standard,” and so therefore justifiable. It’s not justifiable, especially under the current financial conditions. And I don’t give a fig what Napanee or Tweed or any other jurisdiction does. Perhaps the ‘industry standard” ought not to be the industry standard.
Brydges-Kennell apparently puts in around 30 hours a week, but again, that’s what I‘m hearing. from more than one credible source. That’s not bad for somebody coming from a $25,000 a year part-time position with the BIA. It takes 25 grand off their books and adds 70 grand and benefits to the books of the municipality. And that’s a tough sell.
It’s an especially tough sell to a taxpayer who knows nothing about her or what she does, but is asked to foot the bill for her presence on staff, on top of all the other bill-footing being asked of him or her.
If any of this is true, in whole or in part, I can almost guarantee it will not go down well with rate-payers, especially is an iconic museum closes, or students don’t get hired in other areas of cutting.
An increase of around $1million for staffing over the course of a single year. That’s going to require some explaining if it’s to pass any realistic test of legitimacy.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 