Extra city expenditures in Moncton not only linked to wages for new staff, but space to house them in

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Increased city staff has meant a need for more space at Moncton City Hall.

In the past five years, 66 new positions have been created at the City of Moncton, 49 of them at City Hall and 17 in Codiac Transit.

The cost to the city for the additional staff works out to about $3 million a year.

Assistant city manager Don MacLellan says that when they first moved into the city hall building in 1996, there was space on the third floor the city did not need, so it elected to lease it to a law firm.

But by about 2006, some of the city departments were starting to feel a little cramped in their quarters.

"And because the law firm had grown, the building was suddenly getting awfully tight," MacLellan says.

"In late 2006, we started to play with the idea that maybe it was time to reclaim that third floor space."

MacLellan says a need for more space wasn't the only issue.

The city also wanted to devise a layout that would better serve the public and bring together in the same space departments that often work together.

In particular, the second floor of City Hall is now devoted to development activities, housing building inspection, town planning, and economic development. Moncton Industrial Development staff were also moved into the building.

MacLellan says the changes were completed early this year.

"If you come to City Hall now you will get all of those services on one floor," he says. "Those development groups have to talk frequently, so to have them on one floor with a common boardroom makes good business sense.

MacLellan says the recreation, parks, tourism and culture department had also expanded and needed a little more space.

"We were in the building for 10 years. Some of the needs had changed for space," he says. "Building inspection was also a bit cramped and we wanted to deliver services differently."

The changes have meant a loss of revenue for the city, another element that counts toward the $30 million difference between the city's budget five years ago and what it spends today.

The city currently has a 25-year, long-term lease agreement for City Hall, which includes an option to purchase the building when the lease is up in 2021.

Although taking over the space on the third floor did not cost the city any more money -- it was already paying to lease the entire building -- it did lose the revenue generated by sub-leasing the space to the law firm.

The only entity which continues to lease space within the city hall building is the Greater Moncton Planning District Commission.

MacLellan says the extra space means the city now has some room to grow for a little while yet, though he says there are still some design changes that need to be made, in particular on the fourth floor in the engineering and finance departments.

MacLellan says there was money budgeted this year to do that, but the project is up in the air at the moment because of the cost overruns in the snow removal and fuel budgets and there is the possibility the work may be put on hold.

Of the 49 new positions at City Hall, 12 are in the recreation, parks, tourism and culture department, 10 in engineering and environmental services, six for civilian staff at Codiac RCMP, and four each in human resources and building inspection.

Human resources director Laurann Hanson says those numbers give an accurate picture of how much each department has grown over the past five years as they represent new positions, not transfers of duties from one department to another.

"It isn't that common that a position gets transferred from one department to another. That is certainly not the norm, it is the exception," she says.

In theory, if an employee and their duties were transferred to another department, it could leave the first department with an opportunity to hire an additional employee without seeing its number of positions increase, though the workload would have decreased.

However, in addition to that kind of transfer being extremely rare, Hanson says the city manager must approve hiring for any vacancy that occurs, even a budgeted position.

"We do need to present our case, our need for the position," she says. "It can't be filled, whether existing or new, unless the city manager approves."

New positions, like the 49 created over the last five years, must additionally be approved by city council.

"Increases in head count do require the approval of city council as well," Hanson says. "The city manager needs to see the need for a new position to be added . . . The ones he or she approves will then get advanced to council for their approval during the budgetary process, so it is quite a rigorous process."