Incomprehensible

They don’t speak the same language. There are no interpreters. Shire Hall finance folks and council members spend budget deliberations time mostly talking past each other. They pick up snippets of the other’s dialect—but rarely enough to fully grasp the meaning.

The County’s finance director, unsurprisingly, speaks finance. Her presentations are laden with numbers, ratios, jargon, and acronyms. They are full of shorthand and detail that enables efficient communication among co-workers, auditors, and provincial compliance folk. It is largely impenetrable and mostly incomprehensible to council members.

The finance director is smart and diligent. The fault is not hers. She works hard to simplify the terms and narrow the many threads into coherent presentations. It matters deeply that her office is transparent and deferential to Council.

But it doesn’t work when your counterpart, in this instance, Council either fails to grasp the explanation or are stuck on themes landed upon a decade ago, and unable to move beyond. There can be no effective communication.

It is a problem.

So when the finance director stops talking, there are no questions. No comment, other than to thank the director for her work involved in pulling this expansive budget together. Eventually, however, a council member, having waited a respectful amount of time will demonstrate they weren’t listening at all.

“It’s time we got serious about roads, they will say.” “Here, here,” the group harumphs. Others will jump in. “Yes, when are we going to get serious about roads?.”

They get roads. Their constituents understand roads. And complain regularly about them often.

So instead of talking about finances, Council talks about roads–about getting serious with its roads. Sadly it is the same observation they have made in each of the past 11 years of budget deliberations. Each year they steel themselves and dig deeper into taxpayers’ pockets to toss more wheelbarrows of cash into the ravenous maw of the roads budget.

That it will have no effect, should have been obvious after doing the same thing year after year.  But these folks, as a group, lack the basic concepts to enable them to navigate County finances effectively. And they refuse to believe others who have made it plain—Prince Edward County cannot afford its roads.

As their new County manager spelled out this week, the municipality’s infrastructure needs are far in excess of its means to fund them. This has been clear since at least 2014, when a study Council paid for, laid out that the County has neither the borrowing, taxing or other funding means to restore its roads, bridges, and culverts to a sustainable condition. This means that absent the appropriate dollars (we collectively cannot raise), our roads are decaying faster than we can repair them. It is, at best, a triage exercise. This has been true and evident for the past six years. Yet, each year council vows this year they will get serious. The house is burning–but this year like every other budget season in recent memory, they will bring a couple more pails of water in a vain attempt to extinguish it.

It is a fundamental failure to communicate.

One councillor urges his colleagues to press the County to take on vast new debt to fix roads because borrowed money “is effectively free”. It is magical thinking. It confuses low-interest rates, and therefore lower debt servicing costs, with “free money”. It isn’t free. Debts need to be repaid. With interest. Furthermore there is no revenue source generated by the County’s road network to offset this debt. It is just more debt. There is no return on investment. It is just more money into a deep, dark hole.

Another council member says her colleagues ought not shy away from hiking taxes to pay for roads, because residents will “understand” the decision when they see improved roads. Set aside the fact that the County is already pricing itself into a place where only the wealthy may reside, it ignores the very real fact that doubling or tripling municipal taxes won’t get us there.

This is not secret information. It is documented in black and white in a study Council has had in their hands for the better part of a decade.

In fairness, this disconnect does not entirely rest on the shoulders of council members. There is a structural aspect to the failure to communicate financial concepts and challenges in this municipality, and likely many others still struggling through an ill-conceived and terribly executed amalgamation. At any other level of government, our representatives will have staff whose job it is to explain the complicated bits. To break it down into digestible pieces. But local government lacks the scale or resources to employ such intermediaries.

This means finance folks have more work to do to strip away the jargon and clutter. How much are we spending? How much did we spend? What does the five-year track look like? Is it sustainable? How much did we take in? The difference between revenue and expenses. The five-year track? A similar set of explanations for capital expenditures. And wrap up with a summary of the balance sheet–with a focus on debt trends.

In learning any new language, it begins with the basic building blocks. And going from there. There are no shortcuts. Our representatives also need to work harder to listen to their staff–to hear and understand the concepts they are spelling out.

In the meantime, we must rely on finance staff and council members to work harder to hear each other and to talk to each other. This must begin by laying out a common set of facts–things that are known to be true. Only then can these folks have a meaningful conversation.

Yes, by all means, let’s get serious.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca