Fail

The kindest thing that may be said about the County’s 2019 budget, just completed, is that a few more folks will become municipal employees. Beyond that, it is a full-on catastrophe.

Never in the history of the amalgamated County has a council transferred as much wealth from its residents to the coffers of the municipality, as it did last week. In doing so, it has made living in this community more tenuous for those existing on the margins. Council has made it more compelling that families leave, to find a more affordable place to live elsewhere. And thus our population dwindles, and inequality grows. There are surely other forces stacked against working families in this County—but this is something that County council directly controls. And it failed.

Council needs to be a force to protect residents from the ambitions of the bureaucracy—where success is measured by the ever-expanding size of one’s empire. Council members are supposed to look out for the most fragile in our community. Instead, this new council has become complicit by imposing the largest tax increase in two decades. They have made themselves part of the problem.

Here are the numbers:

Last year, the County raised $35.5 million through the tax levy—from you and me through our property taxes and indirectly through our rent (it only spent $31.4 million so far, but we’ll come back to this in another column). This year it will collect $38.5 million. That’s $3 million more than last year. That’s an 8.6 per cent tax increase (no matter how hard Shire Hall folks spin this).

There have been larger percentage increases (12.4 per cent in 2005 for example) but the amounts were smaller then. Never has council transferred so many dollars from its constituents to its municipal mandarins.

This is why it matters.

In 1998 the tax levy was $10.3 million. The County’s population was about 25,000 people. A decade later, the population had shrunk a wee bit, but the levy had doubled to $22 million.

Another decade has passed and the population has dipped further. Meanwhile, the tax levy has skyrocketed to an astonishing $38.5 million. Fewer people are living here than did 21 years ago, yet nearly four times the amount is being extracted from taxpayers’ pockets. Add similar increases in waterworks and user fees and it becomes crystal clear that Shire Hall is contributing to the County’s inexorable transformation into an exclusive enclave of the wealthy.

I don’t wish to be so critical of this new and largely inexperienced council. The budget process is arrayed in favour of the house. For four long days they listened to a procession of folks, making impassioned and compelling arguments for more money. Much of it is said to be necessary to meet some external or arbitrary benchmark. But no one asked what happens when you can’t have enough money to meet these artificial standards. What if we can’t afford our roads (we can’t). No one made the case to spend less. To take from here, to pay for that. To spend better. More prudently.

This new council continues a trend set since amalgamation (a restructuring scheme, remember, that promised to make local government more efficient and less expensive). Since 1998, the tax levy—the amount collected from you and me—has risen at a rate of 6.3 per cent. Inflation, meanwhile, has averaged just 1.87 per cent since then. What this means is that your local government is clawing back more and more of your paycheque or savings every year. At this pace, the tax levy will top more than $50 million in just five more years.

Some questions.

Over the past few months, this council and the last, committed to acquiring six brand new snowplowing trucks—two last council, four by this new one. Fully equipped these vehicles run about $300,000 apiece. Times six. That is a huge expense. It also represents a major shift in how we run municipal snow clearing operations.

In a more cost-conscious era, the County manager decided to sub-contract out much of this work. To save money. Late last year, Shire Hall pivoted back to bring this function in house again. And last week council doubled down.

We needed a better discussion of the merits of this change of direction. What were the alternatives? What were the risks? The cost / benefit analysis?

Taken together, council approved nearly $2 million in trucks last week. Each one, decaying in value every single day.

Council’s job is to look out for its residents. To temper the demands of the business of government with the ability of its residents to pay. It failed in this, its most fundamental of tasks.

None of this is to say all spending increases or even tax increases are bad. Many folks may be willing to absorb higher municipal spending where a return on investment can be demonstrated, or proof that it is helping those living on the margins. But it is hard to see how millions spent on new trucks meets either of these tests.

That brings us to the most cynical bit.

Shire Hall staff knows our roads are unaffordable. They know that the County has neither the tax base nor borrowing capacity to maintain our roads and bridges. They know this because they paid KPMG, a consultancy, to determine this in 2014. As KPMG reported then, this municipality would need $200 million to address the most immediate issues with its infrastructure. They calculated that the County would have to spend about $38 million per year for at least a decade, in order to stem the deterioration of its infrastructure. They understood this was an impossible target, but the numbers were meant as an alarm, a wake-up call. So far council has failed to fully acknowledge the scale of the roads problem it owns.

We can’t afford anywhere near that amount. Most years the County spends about $7 million. In a big year— like 2019—it will spend $14 million. Even if we could sustain this level of capital spending (we can’t), our roads would continue to deteriorate faster than we can maintain them. Yet council trudges on in perpetual denial.

Occasionally, council—in a glancing nod to the crisis— will dump a truckload of taxpayer dollars into the everexpanding roads hole, believing it is doing something. (It isn’t.)

So it was that council tossed another $930,000 into the abyss last week, likely unaware it will make scant difference— save for the residents who win the road repair lottery.

Last summer, this newspaper pressed Shire Hall folks to hold a special meeting to talk about roads. Lay out the challenge. Explain the alternatives. And make some difficult choices—with their eyes wide open.
We were advised that there was no need for a special meeting, that this discussion would happen during budget deliberations. It didn’t. But the roads department got another pile of cash.

And that, my friends, is how the cost of local government has risen nearly four-fold in a couple of decades.

One new councillor, likely sensing he was aboard an out-of-control train and lacking the levers to slow it down, lamented to his new colleagues that they had been elected to make changes to the local government.

“I don’t think we’ve made any tough decisions,” said the councillor.

Eventually they will have to. And when they do, they will realize that in January 2019 they made their job much more painful.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca