Comment
Up is down
There was an audible shudder of disbelief when Bev Campbell put up a graphic on the screen in the hall at Bloomfield purporting to show property taxes declining over the past four years. It couldn’t be true. Everyone in that room knew their property taxes had risen—and risen sharply over the past four years. So how could the councillor for Picton present a graphic showing taxes falling? The answer is spin.
Our County administrators are spinning the numbers to fit a narrative in which we all pay more. It isn’t new—our municipal masters have, since amalgamation, felt hard done by—compelled to manage the County without the same levels of tax revenue generated by other similarly sized communities.
Every year at budget time, they trot out charts that show Prince Edward County pays lower property taxes than do our neighbours in Quinte West, Belleville and Napanee. For most folks this is a good thing—a sign we are managing within our means. But not so for County administrators. They want to see Prince Edward County ratepayers pay more and move up that chart. They have plans for your money.
Lately the spin is becoming fine art. In the graphic Bev Campbell showed in Bloomfield, what you need to know about that descending line is that the tax she chose to show was based upon $100,000 of assessment. This simply means that if your house was worth $100,000 four years ago—and it hasn’t increased in value since then—you would be paying less in taxes this year than you did in 2008. Of course your house isn’t still worth $100,000—MPAC and the market have seen to that.
It is a bit of mathematical sleight of hand meant to soothe you—or perhaps tenderize you for the big wallop of a tax increase headed your way in the coming weeks.
This is why, since we began presenting budget numbers to you in 2004, we focus on the municipal tax levy. The tax levy is the County’s total expenditures (money it pays out) minus revenue (money it collects). The remainder is funded by you and me through our taxes. It is the purest, most easily understood measure of the performance of this municipal government.
We know that in 1998 the tax levy was $10.3 million. In 2011 it was $24.5 million. This is a growth rate of nearly seven per cent per year. Currently the proposed tax levy for 2012 is $28.0 million. It is not sustainable. It took less than a decade for the tax levy to double; by 2014 it will have tripled since amalgamation, if allowed to continue to rise at this rate.
That is what people are feeling. This is the sting they recognize.
County administrators would be on surer footing to argue for a higher tax levy if our community was growing—but it isn’t. There were 25,000 people living here in 1998 and about the same number live here today.
What this means is that those who can afford to pay higher amounts for homes and taxes are moving here or staying here. Those who can’t, leave. There are others still just hanging on by their fingernails—unwilling to allow a ravenous municipality to push them out of their homes.
Home valuations and taxes are changing this community—altering the place in deep and permanent ways. County administrators can’t control house prices. They can, however, control tax increases. So far they have chosen not to do so.
The County’s treasury and finance folks are doing a vastly improved job of reporting detailed, comprehensive and understandable financial information about the County’s business. Where there was darkness for years, a piercing light has been cast into the financial workings of this administration. There is a huge amount of material available to all on the County’s website pecounty.on.ca by clicking Budget 2012. We owe it to ourselves to become more familiar with how our money is being used.
The County’s new administration chief Merlin Dewing makes a powerful argument that with $800 million in assets and less than $10 million in reserves, the municipality hasn’t prepared for the eventual replacement or repair of what it owns— that we face a serious reckoning of sorts down the road.
He and his team have a difficult task fitting the organization to its finances. There is no question this job will be hard. But it is a mistake to spin the numbers to try and persuade taxpayers that up is down.
It is a worse mistake for council to continue to expand the tax burden without understanding that it is fundamentally changing this place. Even if the consequences are unintended, it is surely not the role of local government to decide who will live here and who won’t.
rick@wellingtontimes.ca
Steve Campbell in his column entitled “Back Away” writes “The problem is: the model that governments of all kinds are built on is broken.” CORRECT !! His diagnosis about linearity is wrong. That’s process and policy. The problem is much bigger.
If Steve, The Times and its readers are really interested in how a discussion of fixing this broken model, let’s get started.
The discussion has to start at the level of PRINCIPLE (Sorry Steve)
… before one gets near the POLICY suggestions that have inevitably come to trump principle in a “system of government” that has increasingly been perverted from its core purpose by overwhelming partisanship and by the dominance of the executive in the back rooms and in the bureaucracy.)
… and long before partisan PROGRAMME proposals are allowed to continue to dominate as the foundation of policy?
**
We do need a serious discussion of such matters in this country.
The underlying issues require deep and thoughtful examination – and we need that to proceed at far greater depth than it could possibly occur on Steve’s page – or in an hour or two in Council Chambers.
And we need it to proceed in a way that is entirely different from that which dominates in the schools of Economics, Public Administration, Business Administration and Political Science or the studies of those who are obsessed with the system and its successes and its deficiencies. It also won’t come from journalism. (Sorry Rick).
It’s not a matter that could possibly be constructively approached from a consideration of data or process or management – or with any tendency to analyze.
Those are the sorts of approaches and disciplines that have tied us in Gordian knots upon Gordian knots.
We know that their approaches have shown it to be an intractable mess – that inevitably leads to the conclusion that the necessary intermediary is more soothing spin.
The only hope for getting untied is to begin with a truly thoughtful consideration of fundamentals. Principles and Purpose. Once there is agreement on that front you can move on to Policy and Process. If you don’t have the discussion not much will get resolved. Bad decisions will continue to be made. With difficulty.
Are you up to it? Are you up for it?