New days

While campaigning last year, mayoral candidate Monica Alyea used a pumpkin when talking about the County’s finances. The pumpkin was held aloft in a couple of pieces. The large portion— roughly three-quarters of the total— was meant to illustrate the size of the municipality’s mandated funding: expenses over which the local government pays the bill but wields little control such as the County’s $4.5 million police services budget. The smaller wedge represented the portion of the County’s budget within council’s discretion. “These are the things you love about the County,” said Alyea, “things like parks and arenas.”

Though an oversimplification of the various levers at Council’s disposal, Alyea’s pumpkin remains a useful analogy as County residents prepare for a reshaping of local municipal services in 2012.

In his first significant initiative since becoming the County’s manager in October, Merlin Dewing has embarked on a bold plan to make the business of the m u n i c i p a l i t y smaller. The County is trying to do too much with too few resources, according to the new chief administrative officer. No longer will the rationale that “this is how we’ve always done things” be an acceptable operating model.

This is refreshing. Too often when faced with difficult choices in the past, local administrators swung from a disappointing mix of procrastination—patching over problems and putting off to tomorrow what should have been done today—to the zany: bizarre financial engineering schemes that failed to deliver anything but a mound of debt. The prevailing view saw the County ratepayer as a big fat wallet, willing and able to absorb any tax increase. The new manager has signalled an end to those days. Dewing is intent on paring down the size of County government or, in the alternative, finding new ways to fund the things the County can’t afford.

This will be hard work. Tightening belts is never easy. Many folks and groups will howl in protest—and justifiably so—for what is the unifying purpose of local government if all that is left is a rigid and robotic deliverer of provincial programs? Is fiscal sustainability really a worthwhile objective if at the end of the day, local property taxes are gobbled up by provincially mandated services that choke out “the things we love”? These are genuine worries conjured by Alyea’s pumpkin.

Yet there is little alternative. County ratepayers are not a limitless stream of cash. While many can endure hefty tax increases year after year—many cannot. The County has many families living on the margin in this community, families who have been pushed to the financial edge in their own home. There are many more seniors living on fixed incomes—praying they can stretch their finances out long enough to stay in their County home.

These folks cannot endure another doubling of their property taxes in the second decade since amalgamation. Their choices are already bleak.

We cannot, in good conscience, continue to heap an expanding burden upon the backs of those already struggling. More must be done to shift the cost of discretionary municipal services and facilities to those who can better afford them.

This will take creativity and imagination—resources richly abundant in Prince Edward County. Ingenuity and community initiative must fill in the gaps that local government’s pullback reveals.

And to those councillors who find it repugnant that the municipality shrink to a sustainable and affordable size—channel your energy, instead, toward the bigger chunk of the pumpkin. You have an obligation by virtue of your council seat to resist the cost burden and operating strictures the province continues to place around your neck.

It is not good enough to simply complain about your plight; rather you must wake up every day thinking of new ways to push back against a force that tells you what you will do and how much you will pay. It is your job to wrest some measure of control from the province or, alternatively, eke more provincial dollars. It is useless to waste your time squabbling over scraps with your fellow council members.

I suspect 2012 will be a messy year in local politics— fixing this amount of neglect requires patience and a stiff spine. It will also mean sacrifice. Some of it will be hard to swallow—particularly as some municipal wages rise.

Yet we will likely muddle through—albeit with more than a few bruises and bite marks.

Few will be thrilled with the process or the end result. But perhaps we might ease the anxiety of those on the edge—those unsure if they can continue to live in their County homes. Because in time they could be any one of us.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca