TORONTO

Most of crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford’s senior staff now work for Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly.

Ford came back to City Hall Tuesday to find the locks being changed on the mayor’s staff administration offices and to learn he’s losing around 11 staffers, including Chief of Staff Earl Provost.

But that didn’t stop the embattled mayor from making a last-minute pitch to keep some of his junior office workers late Tuesday in a last staff meeting inside the mayor’s office.

“Do you want to stay or not?” Ford asked the group gathered for the last meeting of his full-sized mayor’s office staff, according to sources in the room.

“He said, ‘We’re in a war.’”

One of the junior staffers Ford wanted to keep stood up and told the embattled politician, “thank you very much, but no,” according to a source.

After that, Ford had one-on-one meetings with the staffers he was trying to keep from jumping ship.

The Sun has learned Dan Jacobs — Ford’s executive assistant — has been named as his new chief of staff. Jacobs is Ford’s fifth chief of staff in three years.

In that last staff meeting in the mayor’s office, Ford told all employees he didn’t have the budget to keep Provost, policy director Sheila Paxton, deputy chief of staff Sunny Petrujkic or David Price — his director of logistics and operations.

Ford’s claim came after Provost and Paxton had already opted to leave to work for Kelly.

Tuesday’s staffing shake-up comes a day after council voted overwhelmingly to strip Ford of his remaining powers, install Kelly as head of the executive committee and slash the mayor’s office and staff budget.

Ford confirmed in an interview on CP24 Tuesday that he will be launching a legal challenge to the council vote to strip him of his powers.

“There is no reason why they took them away from me,” Ford told CP24 host Stephen LeDrew. “We should have taken them away from the councillors who are criminally charged and convicted. I have not been criminally charged, I have not been convicted ... I’ve never stolen a dime in my life.”

Approximately 10 of the 20 staffers in the mayor’s office will now be working under Kelly’s direction while nine will keep working for the mayor, including his newly-hired driver Jerry Agyemang and one of his spokesman, Amin Massoudi.

By late Tuesday night, it wasn’t clear whether either Ford or Kelly would keep Price on staff.

“I can’t speak to the morale of those remaining behind, but I’ve got a young staff who are eager to meet the challenges that lay ahead for us,” Kelly said.

He said they tried to tell Ford ahead of the announcement.

“It’s very hard to get a hold of him,” Kelly said, adding he hasn’t talked to the mayor since Monday’s unprecedented council vote.

Staff under the control of Kelly will work out of the second floor office beside the actual mayor’s office that once housed the bulk of the mayor’s employees — the area is nicknamed “the fishbowl” because of its glass walls.

“The locks have been changed, security has been changed, everything has been changed,” Kelly said.

Workers were spotted starting to frost the glass walls of that office Tuesday afternoon.

don.peat@sunmedia.ca