The City of Estevan has announced that two positions have been eliminated as part of its ongoing work to tackle debt.
Both the events manager position in the leisure services division and one human resources position were eliminated on Thursday and the employees are no longer with the city.
Mayor Roy Ludwig said the decision was made by council due to budgetary restrictions.
"Council is going over the budget more and more, scrutinizing more and more and those were a couple of areas that council felt we could cut back on."
With respect to the events manager position, Ludwig said the City anticipates it will have around four major events at Affinity Place in 2014, which made the position somewhat expendable.
"With us having less events (at Affinity Place) the thought process on council was perhaps we could cut back on that area," said Ludwig, who added that the events manager also handled scheduling in the various City facilities, duties that will now fall to leisure services manager Nathan Jesse and staff in that department.
"They are going to have a look at sharing some of the work that will still need to be done."
The elimination of the human resources position leaves the City with one remaining person in that department. As for future cuts, Ludwig said he doesn't anticipate anymore in the near future.
The members of council began work on the 2014 budget in December and went through what was a very lean document in roughly four hours. However, they have been continuing to work on thebudget since that meeting, Ludwig added.
"We are continuing to look at the budget and continuing to talk to the managers to see where we can find efficiencies. I don't think we'll sign off on it until our new city manager comes. We would like to hear feedback from her and perhaps she can find anything we have missed."
The new city manager, Amber Smale, is scheduled to begin work on Feb. 10.
