Unwelcome advice

AMilford man has devised a better way to look at Shire Hall spending. It is objectively better because his method tracks Shire Hall’s spending over time, simplifies spending into logical spending buckets and compares actual performance year over year. It is easy to read and understand.

But this isn’t how Shire Hall does things. It isn’t how it reports its finances. Nor does it have any intention of doing otherwise. Shire Hall prepares its finances according to provincial requirements and is not interested in applying any of Steve Sykes’s recommendations. It isn’t interested in changing its financial reporting to enable the average resident (or council member) to read or understand how it is spending taxpayer money.

Sykes had watched several budget meetings over the years. He has waded through hundreds of pages of numbers and budget presentations. Yet he was left profoundly unsatisfied. Sykes is a numbers guy. He feels most at home going through financial documents and spreadsheets. Looking for answers. For patterns. For explanations.

But in Shire Hall budget documents, he finds pages upon mindnumbing pages of numbers atomized down to such a granular level that they become meaningless. Even for a numbers guy.

To be clear, financial reporting isn’t a nice-to-have feature. It’s bedrock stuff. Fundamental for a public entity to ensure accountability and transparency—values and priorities many council members claim to ascribe to. Yet County budgets remain impenetrable, and there is zero ambition to improve them.

Further, these documents provide little to compare relative performance. Actual numbers for the previous year are always incomplete— since budgets are prepared in the fall before the year is done—and the only other data point is from two years prior. Trends in the data are invisible. Imagine getting rent increases every year, but not knowing what you spent last year. Or the last five years? You wouldn’t tolerate this in your life—yet this is what you must do when Shire Hall demands higher tax levies each year.

Sykes spent many weekends over the fall and winter poring through the municipality’s financial statements going back to 2016. Long enough to see the effect pre and post-Covid. He prepared a simple table—seven spending buckets and a total bucket—to provide a picture of Shire Hall’s performance over time. For this exercise, he asked himself straightforward and standard questions: How much is the municipality paying in salaries and wages? How much is it paying on interest on long-term debt? How much for materials and supplies? How much for contracted services? How much was transferred to third party agencies? How much for rents and financial services? And how much is expensed on the amortization of assets? Finally. the eighth bucket is a tally of all operating costs. All trends are illustrated over seven years to 2022.

He offered his work to Shire Hall and Council along with a series of questions and concerns spilling out of his presentation of the data. Still, Shire Hall wasn’t interested.

It isn’t how it is done, was the response. It would require more work from staff. The current method meets provincial requirements. And besides, such a presentation would rob decision-makers of understanding potential increases or cuts to service levels, Shire Hall argued.

When Sykes pressed for better answers to the Audit Committee Chair John Hirsch, the South Marysburgh councillor shared with Sykes the Chief Administrative Officer Marcia Wallace’s response.

“You can take any data and tell the story the way you want to,” wrote Wallace.

Hirsch doesn’t dispute that he forwarded the message to Sykes, nor does he disagree with the resident’s recommendations. Instead, Hirsch was hoping to inspire patience in the Milford resident. Hirsch says that Council and Shire Hall plan to look at the state of the County’s budget this summer. The audit chair is hoping to introduce more transparent reporting into the process.

But it will come too late for Sykes. He’s out. He put in this effort and time in good faith. He might have believed, at worst, it would arrive with some skepticism— some questions. Perhaps some clarification. He might have hoped it would be the beginning of a discussion. He didn’t expect a stiff-arm rejection. He didn’t expect Council to ignore his common-sense approach. So he can be forgiven for washing his hands of this initiative.

Steve Sykes wrote Council last month to wish them good luck. He will now turn his talents to endeavours where his skills are appreciated.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca