City can’t afford staffing, services to keep up with rapid population growth, mayor warns

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2024 (325 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mayor Scott Gillingham is telling Winnipeggers to expect to see a budget that reflects the needs of a growing city when it is introduced next week.

The mayor says the city needs more money for services and staffing to keep up with recent population surges. Municipal services, such as police and firefighters, are struggling to meet needs due to decreased staff levels.

“Calls for service to police, fire paramedic are only increasing. Sometimes police indicate they have hundreds of calls in the queue on any given evening. That’s impacting customer service,” Gillingham said Thursday afternoon. “We have to be careful that, on one hand we control costs and not see the size of the public sector explode. On the other hand, making sure we need to make investments at the right time into our staff so that we can deliver services to the citizens of Winnipeg.”

The number of police officers per 10,000 residents has decreased from 20.3 in 2014 to 16.8 in 2023, a Thursday news release from the mayor’s office noted. Firefighter numbers have fallen, too, from 12.1 per 10,000 residents in 2014 to 11.4 in 2023.

In 2014, the City of Winnipeg had 125.7 employees for every 10,000 residents. By 2024, the number dropped to 114.5.

Winnipeg’s population has grown by 65,000 people over the last three years but city staffing levels haven’t kept pace, Gillingham said.

“We have worked hard over the last 10 years to control our costs. One of the ways we’ve controlled our costs is trying to limit the growth of the public service,” he said. “The concern, ultimately, is that we … may get into the area of impacting front-line services, the services the citizens of Winnipeg depend upon.”

The issue is compounded because the majority of new tax revenue generated by Winnipeg’s rapid population growth goes to the federal and provincial governments.

Gillingham is calling for more money from the province.

“There’s not a direct financial benefit to population growth for cities,” he said. “The growth of 65,000 people with all of the economic activity those 65,000 people generate goes immediately to federal provincial governments. A new funding model that we (are) calling for is one that is tied to and rewards the City of Winnipeg for economic and population growth.”

United Fire Fighters of Winnipeg president Tom Bilous has long called for increased staffing levels within the fire department. The current staffing ratio hasn’t changed since the 1970s.

“Despite the massive increase in population, in geographical footprint and, most importantly, call volume for fire and medical, we have regressed consistently,” Bilous said Thursday.

Bilous welcomed the mayor’s call for more money but also blamed a lack of city planning for fire departments in new developments, which puts a strain on existing resources when they are called out to areas far from their home base.

He also called for higher municipal taxes to fund staffing.

“It’s not that we can’t find firefighters. They need the funding. Where (the city gets) that, I don’t really care,” he said.

Gillingham remained mum on whether he would introduce higher taxes in the budget update, set to be tabled Dec. 11.

“I did say in my campaign two things: looking at 3.5 per cent property tax increase annually, but I was also working to get a new funding model from the Province of Manitoba. We haven’t got the latter yet.”

In October, a polling firm, on behalf of the city, asked Winnipeggers if they would support a new municipal tax to generate more revenue for the city. At the time, Gillingham said he would prefer to see a new funding formula instead of introducing a new tax, which ultimately falls at the feet of the province to approve.

Premier Wab Kinew has said he would listen to any new requests but wouldn’t commit to approving any new municipal taxes.

Late last month, the premier announced plans to top up funding for 137 of Manitoba’s municipalities by about $12.4 million a year, starting in 2025.

Gord Delbridge, president of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 500, who represents some 5,000 employees working at the City of Winnipeg, said the city needs to take more responsibility for outsourcing contracts if it wants to save money for a larger workforce.

He said many CUPE members are working on skeleton crews, which impacts services to residents, but the onus should be on the city to re-evaluate how it hands out contracts for business it could be doing itself, like garbage collection.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Biidaajimowin | News from the Centre

Wednesdays

Sent weekly from the heart of Turtle Island, an exploration of Indigenous voices, perspectives and experiences.

Sign up for Biidaajimowin | News from the Centre

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

All of the city’s residential garbage collection is done by private contractors. Last year, council considered a proposal to bring some services in-house, but ultimately decided in October to extend the private contracts through 2027.

“The city didn’t want to look at bringing that work back in-house to a non-profit delivery model. They chose to go to the profit-driven, private sector,” Delbridge said.

He recognized the province’s increases to municipal funding, but maintained the city needs to find more cost-saving measures.

“When times are tough, sometimes you got to start doing more work yourself, as opposed to just outsourcing it because it’s easier.”

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca

Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer

Nicole Buffie is a reporter for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom as a multimedia producer in 2023. Read more about Nicole.

Every piece of reporting Nicole produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.