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Hapless
Larry dreamed of muscle cars. Posters of Mustangs, Corvette Stingrays and Thunderbirds adorned his bedroom wall as a youth. But the Pontiac GTO stole his heart—the car Reggie Dunlop drove in the movie Slapshot. So it was that in his 44th year, Larry had a good run of business and rewarded himself by hiring an outfit to find, acquire, restore and upgrade a 1970 Pontiac GTO. Larry wasn’t mechanically inclined and asked little of his car builder. It had to be fast. Really fast. Had to be a convertible. Had to be purple.
Several months later, the GTO arrived on the back of a flatbed at his suburban home. Neighbourhood kids dropped their ball hockey sticks to come and gawk at the beautiful beast. It was everything Larry wanted. Except it was undrivable. It was far too powerful and ridiculously fidgety. The builders had packed way too much horsepower into a drivetrain, suspension and frame designed decades earlier for a much tamer engine.
When Larry lightly pressed his foot on the gas pedal, it sent 500 horses racing through the big fat tires. Unless the pavement was bone dry, the wheels spun instantly. No amount of rubber would keep this car connected to the road. The car convulsed uncontrollably. Twitching left or right. Even after he mastered the gas pedal, the threat of heaving this hunk of metal into the guardrail or oncoming traffic was everpresent.
I was reminded of Larry’s GTO when watching Council talk itself into another whopping increase in the size of municipal government last week.
After 25 years of unrelenting expansion to the municipal tax levy, Council hiked it higher again—this time by another 7.9 per cent. It’s just the beginning. A new Roads Plan kicks in next year. Once fully phased in, by 2028, this plan will add another four to five per cent to the tax levy—each and every year. (Some councillors have never seen a budget that couldn’t use more taxpayer funds thrown into its roads hole. So as has become tradition, Council laid another thick wad of cash on the Roads Department in the final moments of budget deliberations— on top of the money packed into the capital and operations budget and the shiny Roads Plan.)
Still, it gets worse. The redevelopment of the H.J. McFarland Home relied on access to about $42 million from a provincial fund earmarked for the rapid deployment of new long-term care beds. But now it seems the County won’t make the deadline. And won’t get this money. So far, the province has shown no inclination to extend. More on page 4.
Fire services budget is up 44 per cent, powered in part by higher costs this year in firefighter training. Structure fires, meanwhile, have been trending downward across Canada for four decades.
Waste management costs are 11 per cent higher—driven in large part by a 34 per cent hike in the cost of collection and processing of recycling materials. The market for these materials is disappearing, and the economics are more tenuous.
The General Government line in the operations budget has been on a steep rise over the past few years. It encompasses council, senior leadership, the clerk’s office, IT, HR and such.
In 2018, General Government consumed $10.4 million. But this year, it will top $18.2 million. That’s a growth rate of nearly 12 per cent per year over the past five years. Neither population growth nor inflation accounts for such massive increases. The beast simply expands.
Last week, Council agreed to create a new position in the General Government line—an in-house lawyer. Shire Hall hopes the new hire will save money on legal costs.
Finally, Shire Hall expects to pierce its debt limit capacity next year.
Taken together, it all should make the folks governing this business a bit fidgety. But instead, Council acquiesced. It blew through several big, bright, and klaxon-sounding alarms last week. As Shire Hall expands and grows in complexity, Council is passively drifting into irrelevance. As a collective, Council appears to lack the insight, curiosity, and know-how to govern this rapidly expanding institution.
It isn’t ideological or motivated by principle. No one campaigned on making Shire Hall a massively bigger or more muscular municipal government. (Some may wish it to be so, while others may want the municipal government to become one massive roads department. But no one got elected last fall to preside over unrelenting tax increases—far more than flat population growth or inflation could justify.)
So now we have a big, beautiful government. It wasn’t planned that way. It just happened to them. As it happened to Larry. As it is happening to us. And will keep happening.
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