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.