Mr. Mercier and Council,

So is this "scheduling" problem, your strike-line-in-the-sand, really worth "up to $3.5 million a year"? Or is it the $6 million Susan Sherring so dutifully suggests for you today... or is this all just a smoke screen for far deeper problems you'd rather the public didn't know? By your actions it certainly seems more important to you than the hundreds of millions wasted by management in recent years, let alone the further hundreds of millions you have cost citizens since your labour management skills thrust this strike on us.

Because of the grief and expense you are causing me, and much of the rest of the city, I feel entitled to ask: show me the details. Prove to me that what seems like "penny wisdom" is more important than all the "pound foolishness" so apparent at Ottawa's transit brain trust. For starters:
- How has this 'skyrocketing overtime' changed as a percent of total driver salaries over each year, including the years well in advance of that "just under $2 million" year? Convince me these years have not been cherry picked. I note in the current budget that transit operations expenses (mostly driver wages) for fiscal 2008 are projected to be $146.7 million, pretty consistent with the $145.5 million you initially budgeted in November 2007, suggesting little overtime surprise here.
- When exactly has the overtime occurred and how much corresponds to peak hour congestion downtown? As you know, since 2004 there have been many, many, many days the entire fleet is congested downtown and massively off-schedule, all of which pushes overtime. Unfortunately no one is city hall cares to solve this for another decade.
- Can it be shown that your runaway overtime is in fact even related to changes in collective agreements?
- We know that changes to accounting and operations have taken place during this period, have your scheduling numbers been normalized for this?

Next, let's put this "overtime inflation" in further perspective. We know that FOTO analysis of budget documents has identified that from 2004 to 2008:
- Ottawa's bus transit services total annual operating costs have ballooned 52%, from from $222 million in 2004 to a projected $337
million in fiscal 2008; and
- During the same period, full-time equivalent employment with ransit Services has grown 28% while wages have grown 50%; yet
- Passenger trips grew only 9% over the same period!

Clearly, nearly $100 million a year growth in runaway expenses in just a few years certainly make your "scheduling" inefficiencies look like chump change. In fact for years FOTO has regularly shown staff and council how to save hundreds of millions in wasted transit capital and operating costs... only to have it fall on your deaf ears.

The truth is this city's fiscal-attention-deficit-disorder has been hurting both taxpayers and transit users big time, and for a long time. There is plenty that is deeply wrong with OC Transpo, most of it systematically and apparently willfully wrong. And as with most organizations that under-perform so deeply and so consistently, the root causes almost invariably point to the top of the org chart, not the bottom. I remember in business school hearing a long validated adage: management gets the union it deserves. It is painfully obvious to any thinking person that OC Transpo's planning, management and political governance visibly struggles to support even the pretense of competence.

Yet with all this willful waste, here you are today Mr. Mercier, aided and abetted by an easily manipulated council, self righteously holding the line on one obtusely spun issue -- "scheduling" -- at the core of a protracted strike costing countless grief and over $324 million and growing by $8 million a day.

Stop the nonsense, do your job, get this strike resolved and the buses back in business! Fast!

OttawaLRT at gmail

Reference: "Condition critical, Transit boss says scheduling experiment failed" Monday Jan 19 2009. Ottawa Sun. Susan Sherring, "Over the course of several years, annual overtime costs for OC Transpo drivers have skyrocketed, going from just under $2 million back in the late '90s, to a record $8 million today."