This report is intended to respond to B58/2020 and recommend a process and timeline for the 2021 Budget.

Discussion: COVID-19 Pandemic

The annual budget development process is a challenging and complex task under the best of circumstances as it consumes a great deal of time and effort for a large number of staff across the corporation. A traditional budget development cycle involves extensive staff resources (both operational and financial), which typically begins with preliminary departmental budget estimates developed in June and continues at a high pace through to January with presentation of the final budget and Council budget deliberations. This year however, has been unprecedented with respect to the challenges arising from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Administration has been faced with the difficult task of navigating uncertain and ever-changing circumstances since mid March in an effort to maintain, increase, reduce, or in some cases, suspend municipal services.

Staff throughout the Corporation continue to work on determining the impacts that COVID-19 has had on the organization in order to provide updated year-end financial projections for the remainder of the year. The estimated loss in revenue as well as added expenditures to the City is significant and will require assistance from the Federal & Provincial governments, in addition to mitigating efforts across departments, and various other measures. Departments are also concurrently working on getting municipal services, which have been reduced or eliminated, up and running again while adhering to ever changing Provincial and Federal guidelines. These same staff are also being called upon now to deal with the 2021 budget development process.

An additional process has been established for the 2021 Budget process to separately capture and project the COVID 19 financial impacts in 2021 and beyond. This new process required the development of a new classification and categorization within the budget system to isolate and summarize all the COVID 19 related budget issues so that administration and City Council can assess the impacts and strategize on a funding plan going forward. The additional analysis required to identify and project the COVID 19 impacts on future budgets in a time of ongoing uncertainty will place tremendous pressure on staff resources throughout the City.

A great number of employees are also still dealing with the operational challenges of working from home and communicating remotely in order to adhere to physical distancing requirements. These ongoing challenges will undoubtedly make this year’s budget development process much more time consuming and challenging for Administration & City Council. This current working environment and the expanded resource demands to address the COVID related issues is also making it extremely challenging to consider new processes for the development of the 2021 budget that would address Council’s desire for a “Zero Based Participatory Full Council Budget Model”.