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As you may have seen my annual budget post went up yesterday and was shared widely. This was brought to my attention by a concerned resident (not a leak from council or something).

I didn’t catch this in my initial pass as the critical item is in-camera 2025-0370 on page 79 of the recommended budget which are just a bunch of blank pages in the document. As it is in camera we have no specific knowledge of what this item is – so everything below is speculation.

What is a proposed is a savings/reduction of $536,946 and a reduction of 12 FTE. The only team/group/department that is in Corporate Service/Communications Area that I am aware of, is that size is the 311/211 call centre. It could be a range of customer service people across the corporation but that makes less sense as often those roles are shared with department roles – ex. Parks staff man desks at community centre but are also customer service etc. as I understand it.

You might be asking, aren’t they asking for one time time funding for a customer service rep 2025-0217 as a service enhancement? Yes, they are!

In that budget it they describe the following:

This sheds some light on the theory. 11 current total staff (9 Full time and 4 Part time) which doesn’t quite add up to 12 FTE but then if you consider the vacant position and you now have 12. As min of 11 FTE is required to maintain the call centre and the item above talks about the challenges of staffing the call centre under the current model.

So I am speculating that Admin and the Mayor have proposed requiring a a 12th FTE and then outsourcing as a set requirement for a future RFP. If it were to fail (no bid or if the city’s costs were cheapest) they would still want the new full time staff person to maintain the existing services.

Now the salaries and benefits of 12 FTE unionized staff are not covered fully IMO by $536,000 savings this project. IMO this is the likely amount that to be saved by outsourcing. I don’t believe the union would be informed of this until council approves the budget, at which point formal notices would be given of the outsourcing process – so CUPE may not even be aware (or I am completely wrong).

The outsourcing of 311/211 could have major implications on the City and how residents interact with the city. Not only are 311/211 the first line of contact for a wide range of issues where city have local knowledge, who know where a potentially outsourced centre could be.

311/211 is also used as a basis for a range of municipal decision points and open data. Having a private company collect and/or manage this data could create new bottlenecks for municipal decisionmakers they may not have access to the original raw inputs or have limit methods to check the validity of the data collected.

All of this is speculation but it kind of adds up and is something to be considered as we move forward with the budget!