Welcome to Yorkton’s version of “The Money Pit.”
Last fall, the City contracted Dillon Consulting, at an estimated cost of $80,000, to study the local fire service. Taxpayers were told at the time the focus of the review was to make sure we were getting the best service possible in the most efficient way possible.
To taxpayers, of course, efficiency is a political euphemism for cost cutting. The inference to be made was clearly that, with declining revenues and increasing expenses, Council wanted to save rate-payers, beleaguered lately by six per cent increases year over year, some money.
Saving any money on fire services was a pipe dream, of course.
At $2.5 million a year, or thereabout, in operational costs alone, the fire department is approximately 12.5 per cent of the municipal operations budget.
In the end, Dillon put forward five possible options, three of which would have increased costs and only one of which was tenable in any event, because it was locally-derived with the input of the local firefighters union. Even that option cannot be implemented without collective bargaining with the union and that, as City Councils past and present have found out, is no bargain at all.
This union is extremely powerful by the very nature of the job its members do. Firefighters protect us, and not just in fires. They are first responders in numerous situations. When there is a major incident, they sometimes risk their health, or even their lives. They also face other more subtle risks such as PTSD.
That puts them in the driver’s seat when it comes to negotiations. Who is ever going to say ‘enough is enough’ to our heroes?
Over the past two decades, the City and the union have gone to arbitration over wages four out of five times. The last time, an arbitrator awarded Yorkton firefighters an 18 per cent wage increase over three years. Every other City worker was lucky to get a cost-of-living increase.
Private sector workers, on average, have seen a reduction in real wages.
Forgive us if, while we greatly admire our firefighters, we don’t have a lot of sympathy for their ever-increasing wage demands.
It is all about parity with other jurisdictions, they say, only it’s become a little bit of a game of leap-frog. City A gets a large settlement, which City B uses to argue parity and gets a large settlement, which City C uses to argue parity surpassing City A, which uses City C to argue parity and so on.
The bottom line is, the option City Council finally chose is not going to reduce costs. In fact, costs are likely going to increase.
The so-called “homegrown option” will maintain the 16 full-time positions and increase the number of temporary, paid on-call members from five to 24.
This is supposedly going to save $200,000 in overtime and stat holiday wage costs. Another rationale for the change is that we will now have greater capacity to send a larger contingent to emergencies, something also recommended in the consultant’s report
It is hard to imagine how any of this could reduce costs, something noted by Councillor Chris Wyatt, the only dissenting voice on Council.
Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, there is the $80,000 spent on a review that never had any chance of saving money. Factor in the cost of recruiting—which the fire chief has already said is going to take an “aggressive (read expensive) marketing strategy”—training and investment in gear and any short-term savings are negated, at the very least.
Then factor in the almost doubled membership of the local union and one can only imagine we are in for future costs that exceed present ones even adjusted for inflation.
Welcome to Yorkton’s version of “The Money Pit.”
