City hall is pulling out the spreadsheets, poring over staff benefit plans, calculating how much revenue it can squeeze out of the dusty corners in the bylaw department. The process is akin to taking the cushions off of the old sofa and looking for lost change. When you have discussions about how much the city can make if it expands its dog licensing program, then you know it's tight.
Department heads are expected to do more with less, and there is no doubt much of the pressure, implied or spoken, is based on making sure that the new Anvil Civic Centre doesn't look like the money-sucking venture it could turn out to be.
No one is saying (well, almost no one) that the centre isn't a pivotal and important project for the city's future.
But, can the city support it in the long term? Staffing costs are the killer. You can turn off the lights at night to save on the Hydro bill, but someone has to run the joint in the daytime.
The city is currently recruiting for two administrative positions - the facility's general manager, and the sales and marketing manager. And while existing staff will fill some of the roles at Anvil centre, the centre will also require some new staff positions, including a building maintenance supervisor and workers, an arts specialist (director/curator, archivist, and exhibit/perpetrator), a conference duty coordinator who provides support when events are taking place and a conference beverage coordinator.
The projected costs will be $1.2 mil-lion in 2014 when it all gets rolling. In 2013, at $263,000 that amounts to .44 per cent of the current proposed 2.9 per cent tax hike. It doesn't take a city treasurer to tell you that the new civic center may take a much larger share of the tax bill in the future.
Is it worth it? Time will tell. But if parks get run down and other facilities suffer because the new bright and shiny kid on the block gets the lion's share of resources, we suspect someone will pay for it - politically, if not through the pocketbook.
