Stratford’s finance and labor relations committee voted at Tuesday’s budget meeting to add a climate-change coordinator position to the city’s 2022 draft budget. The estimated $75,000 cost of that position will be split between the 2022 and 2023 budget to reduce its impact on this year’s tax levy.
In addition to adding a number of service expansions and enhancements to Stratford’s draft 2022 budget, the costs for which will be split between this year and the 2023 budget, Stratford councilors also added a dedicated city climate-change coordinator to the draft budget.
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At Tuesday’s finance and labor relations committee meetings, councilors summarized 2022 budget deliberations, beginning with the committee discussion around how to incorporate nearly $677,000 in service-enhancement and expansion requests.
Those requests involved the hiring of new staff, including both a manager of inclusion, equity and Indigenous initiatives and a coordinator of equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives, and the development of a municipal cultural plan and a municipal partnership program, the latter of which is aimed at pursuing sponsorships for city recreation facilities.
In discussing those service expansions and enhancements and after hearing local activist and retired MP Mike Sullivan speak earlier in the meeting about the need for a dedicated staff member who can help staff apply a climate lens to city initiatives beginning this year, Coun. Jo-Dee Burbach introduced a motion to include the hiring of a Stratford climate-change coordinator as a service expansion in the 2022 draft budget.
“At the (recent) ROMA (Rural Ontario Municipal Association) conference, they talked about the importance of mainstreaming climate change into all of our policies and planning documents and applying a climate lens as well to update them,” Burbach said.
The councilor said that while it’s important to form a working group comprising city staff this year to determine exactly what resources are needed to implement corporate climate-change initiatives across all departments, it’s also important to have someone in place and ready to lead those initiatives when the time comes.
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“There are a couple of big projects that are coming forward in the next year that we really will need extra hands on deck for,” Burbach said. “One of them is the official plan update, and the other is the creation of green development standards.
“I just can’t see how the existing staff might be able to tackle all of that.”
Taylor Crinklaw, Stratford’s director of infrastructure and development services who is spearheading the formation of the climate-change working group, said hiring a climate-change coordinator this year would likely cost roughly $75,000 in salary and benefits — similar to the costs for hiring a coordinator of equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives.
And, as with the other service and expansion requests added to the draft budget Tuesday night, Crinklaw said that cost could be staggered between the 2022 and 2023 budgets to reduce its impact on this year’s tax levy.
“The working group will just help to find what services or what tasks will be associated with that (climate-change coordinator) position. Since that working group has just initiated, it would be several months at least before we have any kind of inclination of what kind of resources we might be looking at going forward,” Crinklaw said, indicating that a climate coordinator would likely not be able to start working until that time, thereby saving the city at least a few months salary and benefits costs this year.
While Coun. Cody Sebben raised some concerns with adding the position to the draft 2022 budget without first seeing a formal description of the position and knowing more about what the job would entail, he ultimately supported Burbach’s motion on the promise that staff will bring back that information at Stratford’s next budget meetingJan. 31.
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count. Tom Clifford, on the other hand, voted against adding the coordinator position to this year’s budget.
“We do have a shared coordinator,” Clifford said, referring to the Perth County shared climate-change coordinator working to develop greenhouse gas reduction plans for Stratford, St. Marys, Perth County and its four lower-tier municipalities. “I think it’s important to have a climate coordinator, but I don’t believe we have to have one until 2023.”
In response, Coun. Kathy Vassilakos pointed out that the shared climate-change coordinator is working to help the partner municipalities develop community climate action plans, while a dedicated coordinator for Stratford would largely focus on developing and implementing corporate climate-change initiatives specifically for the City of Stratford.
Along with a few more minor updates to the budget presented at Tuesday’s meeting, Stratford’s acting director of corporate services, Karmen Krueger, said the service-enhancement and expansion requests, including the addition of the climate-change coordinator, will increase this year’s proposed budget levy by a little more than $240,000.
While there may be more cuts as councilors continue discussing the city’s draft 2022 operating budget at next week’s budget meeting, the proposed budget levy remained at just shy of eight per cent over last year’s roughly $63.5 million levy.