City of Calgary officials provided some clarity Thursday morning regarding the implementation of $60 million dollars in approved budget cuts and the planned layoff of 115 employees.
According to City Manager, Glenda Cole, the process for staff layoffs began on Tuesday and will take a few weeks to roll out.
"It’s never easy to lose loyal and committed colleagues who take pride in providing services to Calgarians and to council every day," said Cole, "and it’s never easy to reduce services that Calgarians value."
Chief Financial Officer Carla Male, was not able to reveal the exact cost of the layoffs. She adds the cost is unknown at this point, while the city works to figure out how many of the affected employees may be retiring, the cost of potential buyouts, or if some workers may shift positions.
"Our processes will take a few weeks so we are currently working to identify and our to the right respectful and dignified process."
The city currently employs 14,410 people, so the 115 layoffs are less than one per cent of all workers. Although, city administration adds there will be further budget reductions to come in 2020.
The city confirmed administration will be bringing forth different scenarios to council during the November budget deliberations, which will likely also include reductions to the budgets of the mayor and councillor’s offices.
As for reductions in frontline services, those changes are continuing to roll out.
The city was able confirm that transit routes will be affected in the next few weeks by September 2. As a result of nine million dollars being cut from public transit, the city estimates there will be roughly 80 thousand fewer transit operation hours which will result in buses and CTrain coming less frequently.
Meanwhile, other services like fire could be affected as early as next week. That’s according to the Calgary Firefighters Association who says it will have four fewer medical response units and only one rescue unit on the frontline.
