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Wellington County municipalities lay-off and stop hiring part-time and temporary staff

This move largely affects parks and recreation departments in member municipalities
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Centre Wellington's municipal building at 1 Macdonald Square, Elora. Keegan Kozolanka/GuelphToday file photo

WELLINGTON COUNTY – Wellington County municipalities are reporting lay-offs of part-time and temporary staff as well as holding off on any hirings for the time being. 

This move largely affects parks and recreation staff in the county. 

“Similar to other municipalities in Wellington County, we have done an emergency suspension to our temporary part-time staff, which are mostly in our parks and recreation facilities, due to the closures,” said Andy Goldie, Centre Wellington CAO. “We have delayed our summer student hiring and we’ve stopped hiring for any of our vacant positions.”

Mapleton CAO Manny Baron also said they have had to relieve people of their duties and train others to work in other areas of the municipality.

“We have our full-time staff still working and we’ve redeployed some to cross-train in the administrative office,” Baron said. “The full-time folks are staying and the part-time and contract folks have been relieved. We’re not hiring summer students.”

Baron said this is both for health and safety reasons as well as a cost-saving measure for the town. He explained summer students would normally be the ones who do landscaping work and the town will now need to figure out how they’ll make that happen this year. 

Jessica Spina, communications officer for the Town of Erin, haven’t laid-off staff but have not put out a call for summer students for camp programs.

“We’re not actively recruiting yet because we’re unsure of what the summer will look like,” Spina said. 

Spina explained that different departments are taking measures to prevent infection.

“Our roads department is continuing to work outside but they either have staggered start shifts or are working on projects that involve them being on their own,” Spina said.

Guelph/Eramosa mayor Chris White said their town is also spreading staff around to prevent crippling full departments. He noted this was especially important for the fire department. 

The mayor said seasonal winter workers’ contracts have expired and at this point they aren’t bringing summer students on board. They will re-evaluate this decision at a later time. 

“If this stretches out into the summer then we won’t be bringing them on board at all,” White said. 

White stressed that full-time staff is still busy and none of them have been laid-off because they are a small municipality. 

“We’re still functioning, everything we normally do like processing dog tags, taxes and all the normal paperwork that flows through a municipality, a lot of that still exists,” White said. 

White said the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a difficult situation for municipalities because of the unpredictability of it all in regards to hiring part-time and temporary staff. 

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen here so we’re reassessing as we go along,” White said. “We think we’re heading into a period of a couple months of things being relatively the same and then we’ll do another assessment at that point.”


Keegan Kozolanka

About the Author: Keegan Kozolanka

Keegan Kozolanka is a general assignment reporter for EloraFergusToday, covering Wellington County. Keegan has been working with Village Media for more than two years and helped launch EloraFergusToday in 2021.
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