A total of 177 City of Ottawa jobs were slashed on Wednesday in the second and last round of a sweeping reorganization.

In a message distributed late in the afternoon, city manager Steve Kanellakos said "75 managers have departed from the organization and 102 unionized employees in administrative positions have been given notice."

Of those unionized employees, "some may depart while others will find placements through the collective agreement process," Kanellakos said.

The layoffs have been expected since July, when Kanellakos reorganized city departments and cut the city's senior management team from 21 to nine.

Cutting management layers and consolidating departments will save the city $14 million a year, Kanellakos said, adding that one of his key directives from city council was to put an end to its perpetual challenge of dealing with budget deficits.

Employees 'reeling'

The cuts will affect professionals especially hard, said Jamie Dunn, executive director of the Civic Institute of Professional Personnel.

Sixty of his members — representing a third of the eliminated positions — were called into meetings at buildings across the city to be laid off Wednesday, then escorted out the door.

"A lot of people are scared, shocked, really thrown," said Dunn, adding many had worked for the City of Ottawa for 15, 20 or even 28 years.

Dunn said they will likely now be at home, receiving pay and benefits for up to eight weeks, until their rights to severance kick in. He also hopes to work with the city to find vacancies or new positions for them.

"But their main concern is, 'Could I get another job? What's going to happen to my ability to feed my family and pay my mortgage?"

Given that his members plan the city's programs and review policies, Dunn said the loss of their jobs will affect the work of the city.

"While many of these people are not frontline, they're certainly the brains and the capacity and the innovators behind the frontline that make those services effective," Dunn said.

Staff were bracing for layoffs

Kanellakos said part of the reason so many CIPP members were affected by these layoffs has to do with with their holding roles he considered "business support."

He explained that some departments had dozens of people in administrative roles unique to that department, and they didn't talk with colleagues outside their silo.

"What happened over time was not a planned growth of these business support areas. It was an incremental growth of individual managers making decisions about people they needed, and brought in on term," Kanellakos said.

"And that crept up. It's grown and grown."

Kanellakos said each department now will get the same 23 support staff, and that his goal was to improve accountability and reduce bottlenecks when it comes to decision-making at the city.

His focus was therefore on administrative roles, not frontline staff, as he told CBC News at the end of September.

Still, it was a difficult day, with one city employee describing the mood around City Hall Wednesday as "brutal."

Kanellakos acknowledged it affected him personally — he had originally hired some of the people let go.

"The impact of this, it ripples through the whole organization. I mean I felt that today," he said.

In his message to staff, Kanellakos acknowledged the "long-lasting" work of those who were leaving, and said he and senior managers had difficult decisions to make.

"It will take time for our organization to settle into a new rhythm," he wrote.

"But the period of instability is over."