City Productivity and Performance Audit

Last month, the City Auditor released a report entitled "City Productivity and Performance Audit".

The report revealed some very concerning things about how our tax dollars are being handled.

Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from the report, that Council should keep in mind when considering next year's budget and tax rates.

Middle Management:

The city has more supervisors per employee in 2020 than it did in 2017.  Middle management (see document for definition) has increased by 22% over this period while front line supervisors have increased by 19%

Overall the city has added 232 FTE positions, since 2017.  The number of residents per city employee continues to grow. 

Cost of Government:

(Document Page 5) 

Only 33% of the workforce cost ($19M of the $63M in cost increase) was due to adding workers. 

The other 3 factors were:

1) A shift to higher cost positions

2) Negotiated wage increases for unionized employees (86%-88%) of the workforce

3) Increases for employees not at the top of their salary range.

In other words, during the economic down times, city employees are still living high on the hog, and city council can't control costs.

FTE Change by department: (Document Page 6)

While some areas presumably became more efficient, some others did not.  Waste Management cut 42 employees. 

Communications and Engagements added 18 internal and external government relations employees, and 61 integrated marketing employees. They also added 7 engagement employees.

The city should not need tonnes upon tons of marketing employees, it's a city, there is no competition for property tax collection. 

Managers Managing No-one: 

In 2020 there was 1 Branch Manager, 6 Directors, and 29 Managers who did not manage anyone. 18 of these positions were vacant 

(page 7)

Cost Savings: 

Pg 18 of the report goes over cost savings from right sizing (their words) supervision. 

S 2% reduction in supervisors (-37 FTE) would save $5.3M, 5 percent (92 FTE) would save $13.2M a 10 percent (-184 FTE) save $26.4M and 15% -276 FTE would save 39.6M).

Other fun facts:

City operations added 95 supervisors, and reduced 210 staff. Although their ratio of staff to supervisors is still the highest noted at 9.3 staff to 1 supervisor. (pg 10)

Intergrated Infrastructure services has a ratio of 2.3 staff to 1 supervisor, (pg 10) and had large increases in supervisors supervising 1-2 employees (pg 11), 

The cost of supervisors per FTE has increased in Integrated Infrastructure Services by 40% compared to 10-20% in most others. 

The average budget (not salary) for a supervisor FTE is $143,400 per year.