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Service creep
What is the County supposed to do? What can it do? And how are these choices/decisions to be sorted? These are some of the existential questions a team of individuals is posing in 2026— nearly 30 years after the municipality was formed. That no one inside Shire Hall thought to ask such questions before now says much about how costs have spiralled while the services we receive seem modest. Random. Unremarkable. Or insufficient.
Few residents are sitting at home thinking, “Gee, I’m spending six times more in property taxes, but ya know, my road is a dream.” Or, “this water tastes six times better than it used to.”
Three decades on, Shire Hall is, at last, asking itself: What does the County want to be? What does Shire Hall do well? What can it do better? What should it stop doing altogether?
Perhaps readers will be thinking that this is something council was supposed to be doing. And maybe with a better start, it might have done. If our local government had been set up with proper guardrails or a rough template about how to manage a municipality with 1,000 kilometres of crumbling roads, six distinct water systems, a couple of rinks and a population density of just 24 folks per square kilometre, they might have had a chance to succeed.
Instead, they had to make it up as they went along. Attempting to guide a big lumbering singletier behemoth of a municipality with vastly more needs than residents’ ability to pay for. More responsibilities than resources. Unmoored from financial restraint. Or sense of purpose. There were no manuals. No guides. Too easily moved by whim or self-interest. Or the last conversation at the coffee shop.
As such, there was little they could do without. There was always another municipality with a shiny new service/equipment/technology that folks could point to: We should have this too? Sure, why not?
The experts call it service creep. There was no strategy. No game plan. No barriers. The only criterion that mattered was: Does it feel good? Yes? Then, let’s do it.
It is how Shire Hall finds itself with 11 operational units where there used to be three. It is how Shire Hall has collected new business units with neither the means nor the competency to manage them. Nor the basic rationale for existence.
Shire Hall has a Transit department without transit vehicles. It has an affordable housing department without the ability, money, or experience to build a house. Later in tomorrow’s meeting, Council will be introduced to the brand new Hoarding Action Response Team (HART).
The operating principle until now has been that there is nothing the municipality can’t do as long as a problem can be defined and there are warm property owners who may be taxed. And taxed some more.
The expert’s early diagnosis is rough. (It is to be presented to a committee of council tomorrow.) The team found that there is no shared expectation of what the County should be, what services it should provide, how much it should cost, or what a reasonable outcome might look like.
Further, they found that Council has a penchant for creating new projects/responsibilities/business units within Shire Hall without setting priorities or organizational capacity. It means always scrambling to do everything, everywhere, all at once. And doing little of it well.
The bottom line, according to the experts, is that Shire Hall is carrying “more services and assets than the County can afford.”
When presented with such pressure in the past, the answer tended to a variation of looking the other way or throwing more money at the problem. The current exercise, by contrast, is meant to find a way for Shire Hall to create order in the chaos. To become smaller and more responsive to the needs of residents. To live within its means. The exercise is overdue. Decades overdue.
The experts found that the County’s existing structure has been shaped by history rather than a defined operating model. That is a softer way of saying “We do things this way because it’s the way we’ve always done them.”
It’s a poor way to run a $100 million business. It is precisely how it grew to be six times its normal size.
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