Regina city manager tells staff she’s committed to saving their jobs

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Tensions flared during budget deliberations at Regina City Hall this week as council pondered cutting more than 30 city staff positions to save $1.5 million.

Chief financial officer Daren Anderson and city manager Niki Anderson implored council to consider the consequences of such a decision. According to Niki Anderson, achieving those savings from staff cuts alone would result in approximately 34 people losing their jobs.

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“What I need to say out loud to all the staff that are listening is that your leadership team will do all we can not to eliminate your positions,” Niki Anderson said Thursday in Henry Baker Hall, speaking to colleagues watching on the livestream.

After two days of heated debate on the topic, council ultimately voted to have administration find $1.5 million in savings from any area of the city’s operating budget, not exclusively staffing.

The initial suggestion came from Coun. Clark Bezo on Wednesday. He proposed cutting $3 million — equivalent to a one-per-cent reduction of the proposed mill rate increase — by reducing staff among out-of-scope managers or external consultants.

“If I were to describe the shape of how our city is operating, I would say it’s an hourglass. We’re pretty fat in the middle,” said Bezo.

He insisted that administration could manage the cuts either by not filling already-vacant positions or by nullifying future vacancies caused by attrition or retirement.

In response to Bezo’s assertion, CFO Daren Anderson became heated, pointing to the first-term councillor. Anderson countered that the 2025 budget has already “built in” $9 million in vacancies to reduce the city’s operating request as low as it can go without making cuts to civic services.

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“City administration takes very seriously our cost to our residents (and) we did the hard work to make sure our citizens weren’t erased, weren’t getting too much of a cost, and so to come here and to insinuate that we are not doing that job …” Anderson said prior to being cut off by Mayor Chad Bachynski, who put an end to the debate.

Coun. Jason Mancinelli suggested halving Bezo’s $3 million to $1.5 million, framing his support for the idea as an attempt to push for structural change inside city hall which he hasn’t seen since an efficiency review in 2021.

“A lot of this is built on comments from residents, comments from staff, comments from families,” said Mancinelli, who added that job cuts are not something he takes “lightly.”

Despite administration’s warning, council passed the directive at the end of Wednesday’s budget session in order to secure a 0.5-per-cent reduction on the overall proposed 8.5-per-cent mill rate increase.

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Bachynski re-opened the motion first thing Thursday morning, successfully altering it to find the savings from any area of the city’s operating budget rather than solely focusing on staff cuts.

After the meeting, Bachynski said he spoke to administration Wednesday night for a better understanding of the potential implications which informed his push to reconsider.

Coun. David Froh (Ward 3) said Thursday he was dismayed to see city council making such quick decisions about people’s jobs on the floor of council, emphasizing that he was “strongly opposed.”

“Behind every dollar is a real person who probably went home yesterday wondering if they could pay their bills,” said Froh.

Ted Schissler, deputy city manager of corporate services, had also advised that to terminate employee contracts at this stage in the year and still ensure it results in savings would mean finding double the cuts to offset severance costs.

He also said it can be difficult to “hand down” work from out-of-scope staff to in-scope staff due to contracts, meaning “a lot of things will stop” in terms of city projects and potentially services.

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Couns. Shanon Zachidniak (Ward 8) and Victoria Flores (Ward 6) both opposed the cut without having more concrete data to gauge its ramifications. Flores said she “supports the spirit of this” but had concerns about making such changes on the fly.

She instead asked that a report on staffing and potential places to find inefficiencies be delivered later this year to inform possible restructures for 2026, but council defeated the amendment.

lkurz@postmedia.com

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