It is the first official day on the job for Toronto’s new top bureaucrat.
Chris Murray begins his tenure at city hall today, replacing Deputy City Manager Giuliana Carbone who has held the top job on an interim basis since Peter Wallace’s resignation on April 3.
Murray previously held the role of city manager with the City of Hamilton since 2009, where he was responsible for overseeing a workforce of about 7,800 people.
According to the news release issued by the city at the time of his hiring on June 27, Murray was responsible for a number of major projects in Hamilton, including the development of the city’s waterfront, Tim Hortons Field and the downtown McMaster Medical Campus.
Prior to assuming the top job in Hamilton’s civil service, Murray also served as the municipality’s director of housing.
Speaking with CP24 on Monday afternoon, Murray said that he believes his experience will translate well to Toronto.
“Hamilton like Toronto amalgamated a couple decades ago so the core services that Toronto delivers are really the same core services that Toronto delivers,” he said. “The scale is obviously much bigger, the budgets are larger, the employee numbers are far greater, the complexities I am sure will be different but the fundamentals about running a city will be, I am sure, comparable.”
Murray said that Toronto’s population is projected to increase by a million people over the next 20 years, making infrastructure one of his key priorities.
As for the provincial government’s plans to slash the number of municipal wards nearly in half, Murray said that as a civil servant it will ultimately be his responsibility to work with whoever is elected in October.
“At the end of the day, whoever is elected we are there to serve. My job is to understand what the mayor and council’s priorities are and to make sure the civil service focuses on that and delivers,” he said.
