Last month, we learned that Sault Police blew their annual budget by nearly $3 million — a revelation that will have ripple effects at City Hall for years to come.
John Bruno, chair of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Services Board, said at the April 30 board meeting that the $2.9-million deficit is largely the result of “staffing pressures, overtime and pay equity-related salary adjustments.”
During a wide-ranging interview this week in our SooToday studio, we asked Mayor Matthew Shoemaker about the 2024 budget overage. He joined the Police Services Board in January, one month before city staff discovered the deficit.
“Disappointing? Absolutely. Unacceptable? Absolutely,” he said. “But we're going to make sure that the right checks and balances get put in place to make sure that it brings the overages down in future years — hopefully down to zero — and then keeps us at a place where the community is properly policed, and the Police Service has proper oversight.”
Shoemaker said the deficit will impact the city’s entire budget, not just what the police receive.
“When there is an overage, it doesn't come out of police reserves per se. It comes out of the city's bottom line,” he said. “And so that would have been $2.9 million we could have put toward roads. Last year, the surplus went to pay off debt that we had, projects that the municipality wanted to undertake. These are the types of things that this year we're going to have to defer for future years.”
Shoemaker said he expects tomorrow’s city council meeting to include sone pointed questions about how the overage was allowed to occur.
“Monday is going to be a tough council meeting,” he said. “There's no hiding that fact. Lots of people are upset with the budget overage.”
“What I want to make clear is that this isn't an issue of city council versus policing in the community,” the mayor continued. “The fact is there are officers out there every day, they do a dangerous job, they do an often thankless job. They are working their hardest to make sure that our community is safe, and nothing takes away from that. What this is is a failure of governance.”
Former police chief Hugh Stevenson abruptly resigned in late-March to run for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in the federal election. At that point, the budget overage had been discovered but not yet disclosed to the public.
Questioned by SooToday during the election campaign, Stevenson declined to comment on the multi-million-dollar deficit.
“I'm just not going to speak to police board issues,” he said. “I think that's something that the police board will address in time, and really, I stay out of there. I left that job to do this one, and that'll all come out in the wash. I'm not nervous about it one bit.”
Monday's council meeting will be live-streamed on SooToday starting at 5 p.m.
