To kick off our Budget Week podcast, Peterborough Currents spoke with Dean Pappas, city councillor for town ward and chair of the finance committee about the impact of COVID-19 on the city budget and how the process is unfolding this year.

The audio in this episode is an edited version of the interview. To listen to the unedited interview, click here.

Episode transcript

0:01 Ayesha

Hi there, you’re listening to Peterborough Currents. My name is Ayesha Barmania. 

I feel like I almost don’t need to say it anymore but I’ll say it anyway… 2020 has been an unprecedented year. The measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have had a ripple effect through everything. And as we come closer to the end of the year, we’re beginning to see how it’s impacted the city’s finances in actual numbers.

To kick off our budget week podcast, I called town ward councillor and chair of the city’s finance committee, Deans Pappas to talk about how the budget process works normally how it has been working this year, and also how the pandemic and its recession have impacted it. With city council set to deliberate on the budget next week. I also asked Pappas, what changes he’s hoping council will make to the draft budget before it gets final approval in December.

What you’re about to hear is an edited version of our conversation. If you’d like to hear the unedited version, we have that available on our website. You’ll also find there a transcript of this episode.

I spoke with Councillor Pappas on Tuesday last week. And here’s what we spoke about.

1:04 Dean Pappas 

In my mind, it’s one of the most important documents that we have. It outlines how the city will operate for the whole next year, basically, right? It’s our, you know, people say what’s your strategic plan? Well your strategic plan is our budget, right? If you need if you want a project or you want a program or, or a capital project to go forward, it needs to be in in the budget, right?

1:28 Ayesha 

One thing that I’ve been learning about in kind of preparing this podcast and learning more about city budgets is that it strikes me as like an interesting example and like a collision point for a bunch of different forces that city council has to pay attention to. There is the public and like constituents opinions, but there’s also advocacy groups weighing in, there’s the outside agencies, there’s staff at City Hall and and provincial legislation that you have to take into account. I wondered if you could speak to how these different interests get represented in the budget? And how do you do the kind of balancing act?

2:02 Dean Pappas 

Well, and I think that is the big question, right? I think we have to be mindful of it, and I think people need to keep in mind that, you know, the biggest part of the budget that people think we have, is actually non discretionary, that, you know, that is money given to us by other levels of government, like on social services, to be spent for specific programs. So almost the biggest part of our budget is non-discretionary. Because that’s just what it costs to deliver those services. So, some of those costs are mandated like social services are pretty fixed costs. Right. So there’s not a lot of movement there.

Our union costs our collective bargaining agreements, they’re pretty fixed costs. So you might see that there’s, you know, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s a big portion of our budget is just just salaries. So when you see that big number, but we employ 1000 people, so our payroll is pretty big, right? It’s not quite 1000 people, but it’s, it’s in that neighborhood, you know. And so the payroll is pretty large, when you start thinking about what they all get paid. And, you know, and as you move through all the ranks, you know, and they’re all in different departments, from, from housing, to fire to police, on down to library staff to arts, culture, and heritage staff, you know, to arena staff to people picking up the garbage and recycling.

So, they’re, you know, it is a balancing act, right. It’s like, you know, if we fund that, do we, do we have to lay off people at the museum or at the Art Gallery, or do we increase that and do we have not as much garbage pickup? Right? And, you know, I mean, so it’s all intertwined? It’s not, it’s not a linear line? Like, if we cut you know, if – Are you gonna cut transit to pay for something in a different department? I mean, it’s a difficult choice. Right?

4:12 Ayesha 

Sure. And you had spoken about how the budget can be viewed as almost a strategic plan for the city. Well, what can we read about the city’s priorities in this year’s budget, if we’re – go ahead.

4:25 Dean Pappas 

We’re still kind of getting there. But I, I put a I put as much stock as we can in the public engagement piece. And that’s why we kind of started the – we call it the public budget roadshow. I started it two years ago. This year, it got cut short by because of COVID, obviously. However, we still had 500 respondents to our survey, which is a pretty good number. To me, that shows some, you know, people are engaged, there was still, even during COVID people bothered to care about the budget and fill out the public budget survey. And priorities in that were housing, cost of living and social services.

That was the number one, two and three. When you really break it down, there was 12 priorities. But realistically, the top three are what you’re going to be able to kind of tackle.

5:22 Ayesha 

So how does something like the public survey, how does that get used in the budget deliberation process?

5:28 Dean Pappas 

Well, we’d like to have it done in early May and and staff –

In the old days, council used to give priorities to projects like staff would show up with a bunch of projects and programs that they thought were important. And then council would then go ahead and prioritize all of those right? When you do it this way, it’s almost like the public whose community it is. Right? They do all the living and paying in the community – they’re the ones who get to say, well, these are our priorities here. So, and this year was a little bit of a, of an extra survey because of the PDI money. And what did the public want us to do with that? So?

Yeah, so and now staff – just to get back to your question, sorry about that, I wandered a little bit there. But to get back to your question, staff then take those results, instead of presenting them to council like they used to, then we would pick, the staff really take those top three priorities and try to answer some of them in the budget documents, right. You know they take their cue a little bit.

6:52 Ayesha 

So yeah, well, to take an example, and like you mentioned, from the public survey this year, number one, and two that were listed were housing and social services. And I want to point out also that something like safety and criminal activity came in at eight. I want to try and understand how those results that came in, as I understand it, council directed staff to draft this budget with a capped increase to the police budget, up to 2.18% I think.

7:22 Dean Pappas 

One eight. That’s correct.

7:26 Ayesha 

But I believe there’s also a direction to hire KPMG to look for potential cuts in social services departments, which includes the housing portfolio-

7:34 Dean Pappas 

That wasn’t just social services, they were to look at every department.

7:38 Ayesha 

Okay.

7:40 Dean Pappas 

Yeah every department. They came with 16 areas, they felt that we could save money, and some of them are reasonable, some of them aren’t reasonable. But at budget time – I’ve asked staff to actually break out the 16 and insert them and have the reports ready for when we discuss them in budget, so that we can pull them out at that time, but we’ll see where they go on that. But like, but KPMG really did say that there wasn’t a lot of fat left on on the bone or meat on the bone. Did I mix my metaphor? Or meat on the bone or whatever.

8:18 Ayesha 

You might be looking at meat to trim at this point.

8:23 Dean Pappas 

Meat to trim, I know.

The police budget is up to the police to bring back. We recommend a cap or a guideline for their increase. And I believe that was a six to five vote at 2.18%. That, you know, there are some councillors that wanted to have a higher guideline. So yeah, you probably know where I would have gone.

But so then it’s up to the police by the Police Services Act. We can’t direct the police operationally. So we can give we can say no to the budget. Like when they finally do present their budget here