Challenges in the Public Sector

In the private sector if you have new government requirements for reporting or new health and safety requirements from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) you wouldn’t think of hiring more staff to address the extra workload or hiring a consultant to help you out. Similarly, if your business experiencing substantial upticks in activity at the front counter you would not immediately hire additional staff. You would wait until you knew for sure the level of activity was going to continue. Instead you ask an employee from another area to help out at the front counter.

It doesn’t work that way in the public sector. They hire consultants to help out because their perception is that they are always 100% fully burdened with the existing workload. They don’t think about reprioritizing tasks to get it all done without the need for outside assistance. To watch this in action take a look at last week’s Corporate Services Committee meeting when they were advised of new accounting requirements. Staff proposed to both hire a consultant and hire a new part time employee to deal with the extra workload.

Since there was no real downside to waiting until next year to see how others dealt with this new requirement, a Committee member clearly stated that he would like to make a motion to postpone doing anything until next year which was supported by other Committee members. This sparked an immediate reaction from staff. I invite you to watch the video of this meeting to see what I mean. Watch the expression on the Clerk’s face when postponing this work is first mentioned and note how both the City Manager and Director move the Committee members off of the idea of putting this off until next year without giving them any concrete reasons for doing so. Their only reason was essentially we are going to have to do this eventually so we should do it this year. Here is the link to the video.

https://pub-owensound.escribemeetings.com/Meeting.aspx...

The City Manager and the Corporate Services Director persuasive, albeit it groundless, arguments won the day and the motion was defeated. So now we will be hiring a new part time employee and a consultant to do work which I believe is well within the scope and capacity of existing employees.

This is exactly why Owen Sound’s taxes are $10 million higher than similarly sized municipalities. Their “go to” reaction to temporary workload increases is to hire more staff. We also saw this with the new Short Term Rental Program where a new part time employee was also hired to manage this program. When the workload subsides the new hires are not laid off but they find other things for them to do. They take on projects that are well meaning but don’t really contribute to the core business. Eventually the part time staff becomes full time staff. You will read in my new research study that there has been a migration of positions from part time to full time over the past five years. After a few months, the extra staff are fully burdened with an overwhelming workload, in their perception. So when we have another temporary activity increase we have to hire even more employees and engage the services of another consultant.

The bottom line is that we have people in our community struggling to make ends meet such as the homeowner who left a comment on my website saying that her annual income was only $22,000 and she couldn't endure another tax increase. Instead of recognizing this reality city hall continues on the same path of questionable spending resulting in higher taxes which in turn result in higher rents. So everyone is negatively impacted by a city hall that's oblivious to what's happening in the real world.