City Hall To Shut Down Until The New Year

Remember what Candidate Francis promised "We need a starting point, a place to know where we are so that we can judge how well we do when we look at results. We will conduct in depth audits of all of our departments to assess where we are and to identify inefficiencies and implement sound management principles across the corporation."

The recent Sub-head in the Star's front page story made a mockery of that election promise "Mayor: 'No accountability"

The story continued "We're a half a billion dollar corporation ... and there was no process put into place what we were paying out for overtime to begin with," Francis said. "There was no accountability whatsoever...There were employees who had 30 years plus in this corporation, who had banked all their overtime, and there was no way to track or validate if that was the case."

Non-union employees are being instructed to use any banked overtime by Dec. 31. After that, they will lose any time owing. "Use it or lose it," Francis said"

Accordingly, the 430 non-unionized staff members involved are now booking off and returning on January 1 since they all have that much banked time available forcing City Hall to close down for the next two months.

Relax, I am kidding. But it is great to see how tough the Mayor and Council are on non-unionized staff. Too bad they were afraid to take on the unionized workers. Why the City even entered into a 4 year agreement with their unionized workers, adding an extra year to keep labour peace.

This "new way of doing business" at City Hall will cost taxpayers an extra $1.9 million. Interestingly, the financial gurus at City Hall could not estimate "The amount the city will recoup through pay cuts..."

Whatever happened to the promised "in depth audits?" And whatever happened to Citistat? Didn't it save Baltimore $10 million in cumulative savings over a few years in reduced overtime? Why hasn't it been brought into Windsor to save us money?

By the way, I wonder how Dr. Alfie Morgan would rate a CEO who admited that he was involved in a company for 4 years as one of its senior officials and 2 years as its CEO and had no idea about lack of accountability. What would he say if that official knew about the problem "in the last couple of years when [his company] got whacked with eye-popping bills for accrued overtime..." If it takes him years to act on something so simple and obvious, then how would Dr. Morgan expect him to act on something really complicated such as , ummmmmm, the border issue!

Wasn't it fortunate that this just happened before Operating Budget deliberations started. Oh well, just another problem for which Councillor Budget has to find the money to fix without increasing taxes. And if he cannot do it ........there go his chances to run for Mayor against Eddie, even if he was never going to do it.