Mayor Rob Ford’s allies voted in June and July to reject a provincial offer to pay for two new public health nurses. Now they must decide whether to repeat their votes: the province has made a separate offer to pay for three nurses.

The nurses would work to prevent the spread of bedbugs. Their hiring would significantly boost an understaffed bedbug-fighting effort that currently relies on city employees borrowed from other programs.

Ford said he opposed the two nurses previously offered because he believed the city would have been forced to cover their salaries when the provincial funding expired.

But health minister Deb Matthews had said the funding would be provided on a long-term basis. And Councillor John Filion, chair of the heath board, said the nurses’ jobs would simply have been eliminated if the province stopped subsidizing them.

Ford’s spokesperson, Adrienne Batra, declined to say whether Ford sees the second batch of nurses the same way he saw the first. “We do not talk to the Toronto Star,” Batra said.

The second batch of nurses was offered in the spring, before the city rejected the first. The offer appeared on the council agenda Tuesday, a day before Ford was to meet with Premier Dalton McGuinty to ask again for help with the city’s financial woes.

Matthews criticized Ford for rejecting the first offer. She urged council to accept the second, which will cost the province $255,000 this year.

“It’s not time-limited. It is intended to be permanent funding. What I can tell you, of course, is that any new government can make a new decision,” she said, making reference to the October election. “So nothing in government is guaranteed. But our party, absolutely, we are committed to ongoing funding.”

The city’s top health official, Dr. David McKeown, wrote in a July report that the three nurses are badly needed. Because nurses and health inspectors have been transferred to bedbug work, McKeown wrote, people with other problems have found it more difficult to get help, and the city has been slower to respond to complaints about health hazards.

Filion said he believed Ford had opposed the first offer because of an “anti-government” philosophy. “I’m not sure what would change this time,” he said.

“It’s completely about ideology. Explaining that it wouldn’t cost anything, including benefits; explaining that we would get rid of the staff if the funding ended, immediately; that it wouldn’t possibly cost the city anything — makes no difference.”

The health board lobbied the province for the three nurses. Matthews said they were being offered only to Toronto.

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The budget committee will consider the offer next Tuesday. The committee, dominated by Ford allies, endorsed the first offer, of nurses to work with new immigrants and the poor, but Ford’s executive committee then rejected it. Critics could not muster the votes to reopen the debate at council.

The province has also offered $1.2 million in one-time funding for the city’s bedbug initiatives.