Management and Mr. Pennachetti himself will sift through the buyout submissions, approving or rejecting each one depending on the applicant’s value to the city.
Like Mr. Ford, Mr. Pennachetti could not say what percentage of those 17,000 he hoped to trim with the buyout program.
“We could have hundreds, we could have a thousand people that volunteer for this,” he said.
Rough estimates based on a $60,000 average salary suggest that eliminating 1,000 positions could cost as much as $30-million, but save the city $60-million in annual payroll costs.
During the election campaign, Mr. Ford pledged to reduce the city work force through attrition – not hiring freezes or layoffs. For every six employees that left the city’s employment due to retirement or other reasons, the city would replace only three, he said.
“No need for layoffs. This is a simple measure recommended by the Board of Trade,” he said in a YouTube video explaining his plan for reducing the size of government. He said the attrition scheme would save more than $1-billion over four years.
Mr. Pennachetti is running the buyout plan independently of the city’s controversial core-service review, but the two are both aimed at cutting costs to narrow next year’s $774-million budget gap.
Some stakeholders contend the buyout package is too stingy.
“The industry standard seems to be a little more than six months,” said Richard Majkot, executive director of the City of Toronto Administrative, Professional, Supervisory Association, acknowledging that the mayor is in a tight fiscal position. “I’d like to see a little more compensation for our members.”
Overshadowed throughout the day was the mayor’s announcement of three new task forces – each to be headed by Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti – to devise new plans for tackling Toronto’s lack of child-care spots, surfeit of homelessness and need for new ice arenas.
Mr. Mammoliti said the bodies would lean on public-private partnerships to solve each quandary.
The announcements rattled some veteran councillors who championed the city’s homelessness policy under mayor David Miller, which is credited with reducing the number of homeless people on Toronto streets by 50 per cent since 2006. Councillor Janet Davis said the only problem with long-standing city policies on child care, arenas and homelessness is a lack of provincial funding.
“We don’t need these task forces,” she said. “We have a plan. We simply need pressure brought to bear on the provincial government.”
