Public Health Sudbury and Districts will no longer inspect water quality at local beaches, with those taking a plunge now required to make their own judgement call on water quality.
This is one of several cuts to services which Medical Officer of Health Dr. Mustafa Hirji told city council members about during a 2025 budget presentation at Tom Davies Square on Monday.
The end result is a budget increase of 3.2 per cent to $31,036,499, which requires an additional request of 4.7 per cent from the city, equating to a tax levy percentage increase of 0.15 per cent.
The afternoon presentation only offered a partial glimpse at cuts to services, with a more in-depth list available on the Public Health website by clicking here.
Funding has not kept pace with inflation, Hirji said, noting, “We were able to bridge that with pandemic one-time funding, but we’re now at a point where we have to address that.”
The province is mandating Public Health organizations with “narrowing the scope of public health, reducing the service we deliver to better mirror the amount of funding we are receiving.”
Public Health Sudbury and Districts was offered a financial incentive by the province for merging with Algoma Public Health, but Algoma voted down the proposal earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the local health board directed staff to bring the budget in low, “really in deference to the affordability of the public at large,” Hirji said.
As such, cuts were required, with Public Health reducing services with “the least impact on the population,” Hirji said, including no longer offering various non-mandated programming.
The beach water quality inspections were done at 34 public beaches in Greater Sudbury, Chapleau, Espanola, Massey, Gogama, Killarney and Manitoulin Island. When high levels of bacteria or other unsafe conditions were noted, Public Health would post warning signs and a public notice would be issued.
The main problem with these inspections is that results would take two days to get back to them, Hirji said.
“By two days, things can actually completely change in the area, so we weren’t really providing very accurate information to the public,” he said.
Public Health will now put signs at beaches which will remain in place throughout the year urging people to keep an eye out for such things as cloudy water and high tides, which can indicate poor water quality.
Ward 9 Coun. Deb McIntosh, who chaired Monday’s meeting, requested that Hirji work with the city to maintain some kind of public notice system.
“You don’t want to plan to go to the beach for the day and find out there is a cloud issue that was noticed two days before or a week before,” she said. “We’ll have to take that and work with our team to determine what the signage is going to say.”
Although various cuts to services were made, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will no longer be offered, with some programs being downloaded onto the municipality and others uploaded to the province.
“The idea was that public health would no longer be engaging in work which isn’t mandated to us, and we would leave it to the agencies and organizations that are mandated to do this work,” Hirji said, adding that they’d be working with these organizations to ensure a smooth transition.
Other cuts to Public Health Sudbury and Districts services include:
- The Growing Family Health Clinic, which provides free health care to pregnant women, mothers and children under six years of age who do not have a family doctor.
- Tuberculosis skin testing for non-public health purposes.
- Fee-for-service vaccinations, including some vaccines recommended for travel, vaccines sought for employment purposes, and other vaccines that are outside the publicly funded eligibility criteria.
- In-person food handler training.
- Recommunication of food safety recalls, unless explicitly requested by the provincial government or the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Health Canada offers a recall subscription service, which is available by clicking here.
- Health hazard investigations that are not part of the Public Health mandate, such as housing complaints related to lack of heat, bedbugs, and rodents or pests.
- Vision screening for senior kindergarten students.
- Classroom education by public health inspectors.
- Vector-borne disease surveillance activities, such as mosquito trapping for West Nile virus detection and tick collection for Lyme disease detection.
Public Health is also updating fees for septic system applications to bring them to a cost-neutral state, since Hirji said the rates were last adjusted in 2018.
Routine inspections will be adjusted to better target at-risk areas, with places like splash pads no longer proactively inspected as there are rarely issues there.
“While Public Health has historically offered services beyond its core mandate, this is no longer sustainable,” Hirji said in a recent media release. “We are committed to making the best use of our resources by carefully focusing on services that will have the greatest positive impact on the public’s health.”
As of the writing of this story at mid-day Tuesday, Greater Sudbury city council members had yet to vote on the Public Health Sudbury and Districts budget as part of ongoing deliberations, which were scheduled to continue at 1 p.m.
Sudbury.com will publish in-depth reports on the outcomes of these meetings later this week.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
