North Bay has taken another big economic hit.
OPG's Al Reid, Chief Operating Officer, confirmed to BayToday that the Crown Corporation is redistributing its North Bay operations into other regions of the province and closing the doors on the North Bay offices.
Forty-four jobs will be lost.
Only 20 trades and maintenance staff will remain in North Bay.
See: Looks like Ontario Power Generation will gut North Bay Operation
The 44 transferred employees represent support staff, engineering, environmental operations group. The control group, consisting of 20 workers, will be moving to Timmins.
"This is about the ongoing commitment by OPG to find the most cost-effective way of generating electricity and this was a financial efficiency," Reid told BayToday in a phone interview this morning. "We have a very small bit of generation in this part of the province and we have a very large administrative overhead to manage that so we're merging parts of the operations here in North Bay to some larger existing parts of the operation such as Eastern Operations in Timmins so we can gain economies of scale."
The move will be effective over the next few weeks and take a year to get everything done.
Reid said there is no going back.
"We are committed to making these cost savings for the business."
And he defended the decision not to keep local politicians in the loop.
"We are committed to treating our employees fairly and part of that is that they heard this news first and, as you can imagine it's not a straightforward process to making sure that all out ducks are in a row, that we've talked with the right people like our people and unions before we talk to elected officials. We made the announcement this morning and we've already started reaching out to the mayor and Mr. Fedeli."
Reid says he got a "very professional" reaction from the affected employees this morning.
"We're very proud of our employees and they acted in a very professional manner. They have a lot of concerns. This is affecting their livelihood and the lives of their families. Under the circumstances we had a very professional response this morning."
Reid says the company will now look at selling the OPG facilities on Eloy Road.
BayToday will update this story with reaction from local leaders.
