It’s the first of its kind in the country. It spans hundreds of pages. It’s heavy enough that some have called it “the brick.”
Look out citizens — it’s the city of Ottawa’s Comprehensive Human Resources Plan, a veritable tome outlining every position in every city department and the employees who fill them.
The concept is simple yet the result is huge. By collecting a list of employees and asking managers for a plan of future hiring needs, city hall has created a tool to provide transparency, accountability and clarity to Human Resources concerns city-wide.
This new report is the product of Baseline Coun. Rick Chiarelli’s work as former deputy mayor of Nepean.
No other city in Canada has this kind of compilation.
But if the plan lives up to its promises to increase transparency in hiring practices, reducing over-hiring and preventing under-hiring in each municipal department, then maybe other cities will soon follow suit.
Chiarelli has been lobbying for this project to be launched for years, and says it’s the best tool councillors can have for managing the city payroll.
A similar document was created when he was a leader of the former municipality of Nepean. It was directly responsible for the area’s constant debt-free status.
It has been criticized as a monumental waste of time and effort.
Some say responsibility for supervising hiring and wages should rest on the shoulders of department managers.
Various councillors have protested that this project has them looking at decisions that should be left up to others.
Yet Chiarelli defends his brainchild and points to a discrepancy in last year’s budget: A department manager had predicted he would need eight new paramedics for that year. When it came time for the year’s budget to be drafted, the department actually needed 52.
“If a manager is that far off — 44 employees — on a life or death job, then it’s time for the council to jump in and take charge,” Chiarelli says.
“If we had adequate plans in place, we would not have been ambushed by that request.”
The plan contains estimates for each municipal department, listing how many staff managers they think they will need in each of the next five years.
Now with the HR plan, which was conducted in-house at no extra cost to taxpayers, councillors will be able to better predict what needs to expect in the upcoming year. If an estimate is way off the mark, alarm bells will go off, and the appropriate manager can be held to account.
When the city of Ottawa amalgamated three years ago, promises of reduced costs, streamlined services and a more effective bureaucracy abounded.
Since then, city hall has eliminated 1,150 positions that were either duplicated or unnecessary, but they also created 1,600 new positions, for a net growth of 426 jobs.
Are city officials on track with their plan of trimming the fat? How can they claim, as Chiarelli suggests, they have “cut from administrative part of the city and protected the front line services?”
It’s true that the city’s population has expanded substantially since the 11 municipalities merged and services have increased as a result.
Yet Chiarelli says the new hires reflect the number of positions they’ve needed to fill in order to keep up with the responsibilities Ottawa and Queen’s Park have “downloaded” onto them.
The new HR report allows officials to point out these data to constituents as well as federal and provincial leaders.
Having the data then allows city hall to make the argument that instead of collecting taxes they then have to pass on directly to the province, they should be able to keep some.
Or, Chiarelli quips, it helps them to prove that their federal and provincial counterparts “want us to raise the kids and pay the child support.”