Alan Halberstadt.com

Monday night was another tortuous meeting at City Council, ending in the sudden death of seven city-run daycare centres, five in the city and two in the county.

I voted against the complete elimination of the centres, eschewing the meat cleaver approach. Given the lateness of the night and a fight with a miserable cold, I felt troubled when I dragged myself home that I didn’t fully explain my rationale. In retrospect, there wasn’t time to do it anyway with the bewitching hour near.

Today in this space I will attempt to fully explain.

First, I would like to restate my belief that the city needed to impose contraction on its daycare program. It is a high-cost, unsustainable service in these economic times, and several of the daycares are running far beneath capacity with the specter of free full-day JK and SK programs stealing four and five-year olds starting in September.

The city purchases services from 31 non-profit and 30 private daycares which offer spaces for less than half the cost of the city-run centres. I have personal experience that these non-city centres offer quality care, and the administrative report indicated that they have more than 1,400 vacancies which can absorb the 425 children enrolled in the city-run centres.

My option was to close four under-capacity daycares in September while giving a reprieve to the three most successful and specialized city daycares. The admin charts, as of November 2009, show Jefferson in the east end consistently running at capacity, Glengarry in the core at 69 percent, and College in the west end, at 81 percent.

City-run daycare proponents begged Council for more time to consult and to wait to see the real impact on enrolment of the JK, SK launch before axing all seven centres. Keeping the three most used centres open until Sept of 2011 would have allowed that time to consult with skateholders, and reassess.

This strategy would allow Jefferson to continue offering rare extended hours for shift workers and give the private and non-profit sector a chance to develop more extended- hour spaces. Glengarry and College could continue to offer invaluable outreach programs to single mothers, infants and toddlers in the city’s most sensitive neighbourhoods.

More than that, this strategy would staunch the flow of some 80 city workers–full-time, regular part time and temporary part time – onto the street. As it is now, temps will be separated in September, while 90 regular full-time and regular part-time workers will have bumping rights with 40 hired prior to 1993 totally protected.

HR is facing an horrendous task in placing displaced childcare workers within the corporation. This necessitates training money and knocking the city’s most junior employees out the door over the next few years. People will bump into jobs they don’t like and are not suited for, many of them lower paying. This can’t be good for efficiency.

If alternative employment is not found for all of the CUPE 543 employees with bumping rights, the contract allows the union to prevent the city from hiring some 120 summer students this year. This is virtually a certainty, according the 543 president Jean Fox. And the city would also be blocked from hiring up to 200 unpaid student and work placement positions. This can’t be good for productivity.

All of this comes at the cost of further damaging morale at City Hall. The delay and reassessment of closing three of the daycare centres would temper these emotion-sapping exercises.

The collective agreements tie the downsizing process up in knots, and I anticipate that bumping language will be a huge issue in the next round of negotiations. But that won’t come until 2012.

As for the budget issues, the seven closures will save the city $743,000 a year. That is welcome and significant going forward, but there will be little or no gain this year since the layoffs will not kick in until September.

Monday’s decision will save the city only $266,458 in salaries and day care accessories in 2010. Virtually overlooked by the media in Monday’s resolution were big-time transitional costs:

** $300,000 related to the placement of two temporary full-time employee relations assistants to assist with the placement, counseling and job-search assistance of pink-slipped employees.

** $5,500 for six additional counseling and trauma debriefing sessions through the employee family assistance program.

** $70,000 to allow all displaced employees an opportunity to complete their internal Computer Proficiency Certificate in addition to a variety of Employee Development workshops.

The cost of keeping Jefferson, Glengarry and College open is at a net city cost of $333,465 per year, less than the $375,500 for the three trauma-mitigation items listed above.

The $375,500 will be absorbed by Old Faithful – the under-funded Budget Stabilization Reserve. There will also be “temporary” utility and maintenance costs incurred prior to the disposition of the city-owned facilities. From the 400 Building and WFCU consolidation experiences, we know how “non-temporary” that is likely to be. The Glengarry facility is locked into a 99-year lease which will have to be bought out or otherwise dealt with.

We cannot forget the coterie of daycare non-union managers who will be absorbed within the corporation or given expensive severance packages.

As you can see the toll of restructuring is excruciatingly high in both human and dollar costs, although there is no doubt Monday’s decision was politically shrewd. It made taxpayers and the long-suffering, non-city run daycare operators happy. The CUPE supporters who raised hell are not going to support the five aye-vote Councillors anyway in October’s election.

The special-interest, city daycare community in Windsor is not large, perhaps 350, and many of those parents are from notoriously low voter-turnout neighbourhoods. As for the county, there’s no city voters out there.

Put it all together and you get what you got Monday night – a blunt instrument.