Comment
Too many trees
Watching County Council deliberate budgets is like sitting in the back of a cab in Singapore. Both the driver and Council are working hard and seemingly with good intent, but invariably it dawns on you, 20 minutes or so into the journey, that neither has a clue about how to get to the destination and possess no great desire to do so. While it doesn’t quite feel like a scam—the result is the same—a whopping bill and the expectation of praise and a tip.
Now I must hasten to add that working through the County’s budget is hard work. For everyone involved. Monotonous, dreary, tedious work. Fourteen council members (way too many for this task) must feel their way through hundreds of line items. I say ‘feel’ because it is as though many of them have never been here before. They veer down so many blind alleys and then fritter away an hour or two, working their way back out to the main thoroughfare.
I have been watching this spectacle for 17 years mostly from the soft chairs in the gallery of Council Chambers, more recently via the live stream (Thank you, Lenny Epstein). Despite successively more capable finance and leadership staff, and a more able complement of council members, the budget review process remains broken and dysfunctional— a disorienting process that rewards acute myopia.
Invariably at the end of the days-long session, council members commend each other’s effort and then attempt to spin yet another bigspending increase into something they can “sell” to their constituents. There is little conversation about the big picture. Little curiosity about the direction of local government? What should it do? And why? Are there things its done forever—but don’t need to do any longer? More pointedly: Are Council choices cementing this place as an enclave for the wealthy—at the expense of the poor and marginalized? What is its role in the transformation of this place?
None of this soulsearching or examination of purpose happens during budget deliberations. Never has. I shouldn’t say never—former CAO Merlin Dewing asked these questions regularly. He asked so often and so loudly that Council sacked him.
The numbers, however, speak for themselves. The tax levy has quadrupled since the County was formed just 24 years ago. So too, have user fees. Both have risen at more than double the pace of inflation. Meanwhile, debt has increased 14-fold—and will double again this year. Yet the population has barely budged in two and a half decades. Despite this track record, Shire Hall is making a huge bet this will all change this year—that the flat line of humans will become a hockey stick this year. Maybe.
Last week, Council approved a 5.5 per cent increase to its operating budget requiring an additional $2.3 million from you and me in the form of the tax levy. This term of Council’s first budget produced a tax levy of $38.5 million—an increase over the year before— but less than the rate of inflation. Since then, any sense of restraint has been drained out of them. This term of Council will leave with a $43.9 million levy—a hefty $5.3 million—or 14 per cent—more than its first. Has your income risen by 14 per cent in the last four years?
But even this framing blurs the big picture. Each councillor will tell you they understand that the County is particularly afflicted by an affordability problem. Each of them knows that wealthy folks have largely replaced the 25,000 folks who were counted in 1998. They must know, too, that a great many of their citizens are just hanging on. They are seniors. On a fixed income. Tethered to inflation rates. Many have lived here most of their lives and don’t wish to sell their homes to fund Shire Hall’s insatiable hunger.
Council members mouth these concerns as though they understand their impact. Yet, their choices each budget season serve to push the poor and marginalized further behind. The message seniors on fixed income hear from the higher-than-cost-of-living increases granted to Shire Hall every year is that Council doesn’t care about them. Or worse, that it is powerless to do anything about it.
An example: The waterworks utility, an after-thought in Council discussions at the best of times, is almost forgotten at budget. Meanwhile, some members’ fetish for their ward’s roads gets amped up in an election year. This year was no different. No sooner had one Ameliasburgh council member larded up an already expensive roads bucket by piling an extra 1.5 per cent ($624,000) onto the tax levy when a competing Ameliasburgh member moved to expand the roads budget by $2.5 million. The plot twist proposed by this Council member was that Shire Hall would have to find this money from its existing budgets. (The first bid won, the second failed.)
Lost in the transparent race to be the ‘roads candidate’ this fall was much, if any, scrutiny of the waterworks utility— even though this business rivals some standalone rural municipalities in scale, complexity as well as fiscal and regulation management.
Yet, it nearly slipped by without notice when the waterworks manager explained why the utility is hiring a new plant operator this year. The rationale, in part, is that the higher water pressure expected from a new $7 million water tank in Wellington will result in more water main leaks and fractures. And thus more repairs. And so, the beast grows and gains strength.
One can imagine that this explanation might elicit a few questions on behalf of stakeholders in another setting. Perhaps some second thoughts. How badly do we really need higher water pressure in Wellington? Have we fully understood the cost-benefit trade-off? Has this been explained to residents? But not here.
We are placing a massive enterprise-crushing bet that hundreds of new homes will arise from the ground in Wellington over the next five years and that buyers will follow. Do we have any firmer proof that the projections of growth will transpire this time? Shouldn’t we have this evidence?
The problem is that the big picture is lost after days of staring at numbers. Everyone is tired, a bit snippy and disoriented. There is no forest. Only trees.
Council spent hours last week arguing over $20,000 to fund a grassroots County agency working to address a problem neither Council nor Shire Hall can. It was neither strategic nor fiscally meaningful to a municipality that will spend $67 million this year. It was smart business. An easy decision. But they got themselves stuck. Confused. And utterly lost.
So they go round and round. Every year. Never managing to leave the woods.
Next week we will present some potential solutions. Reader’s suggestions are, as always, welcome and encouraged.
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