Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey, pictured in this 2014 photo, praised the firings of 25 city managers.J.P. MOCZULSKI/The Globe and Mail
More than two dozen senior bureaucrats have been fired from the administration of Brampton, Ont., in a dramatic purge of a city staff that has been criticized for bloat and waste in recent years.
The move is meant to unclog a sluggish government and save money for the cash-strapped city, said chief administrative officer Harry Schlange, who announced the layoffs Tuesday. Twenty-five managers were fired, with only five of those positions expected to be filled.
Tuesday's shakeup was also a bid to turn the page on an ugly chapter in local history. Brampton has been dogged by growing pains as it has vaulted from a quiet Toronto suburb to Canada's ninth-largest city, with charges of corruption or mismanagement afflicting virtually every layer of government.
Mr. Schlange was hired in April to clean house, after developing a reputation for trimming bureaucracy while holding the same post in Niagara Region. On Tuesday, Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey called the new CAO an "agent of change" and praised the firings.
"I'd like to believe that this step today takes us in the right direction," she said in an interview.
City councillors, who approved the hiring of Mr. Schlange, hoped that a dramatic move would help burnish Brampton's reputation, the mayor added.
"They had been in the news for all the wrong reasons and wanted to change the narrative of what was going on in the city," she said.
A scathing report by former Ontario auditor-general Jim McCarter last year found that ballooning payroll costs had eaten up more than 90 per cent of the increase in local property-tax revenue over the previous decade, which should have been a treasure trove for the booming suburban hub.
The report also contained stark revelations about hundreds of millions of dollars in mismanaged capital funds and $215-million of debt on the city books.
That came less than a year after a forensic audit found then-mayor Susan Fennell and her staff broke spending rules hundreds of times, which led to an OPP investigation, though no charges were laid.
Mr. Schlange did not specify which positions would be axed, but along with the layoffs, he announced plans to cut layers of bureaucracy and consolidate others in a bid to make the city's government "a lot quicker, a lot more agile."
Ms. Jeffrey said she hoped the moves would help put focus back on Brampton's assets, like a diverse population and strong life-sciences industry, along with proximity to Toronto and Pearson International Airport.
"We know there's more work that can be done," she said.
Eric Andrew-Gee