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Won’t be burned again
I stole away with old friends for a couple of days last week to an island. Some time and space away. Nevertheless, the subject of municipal governance sprouted like foulsome bindweed despite energetic efforts to nip it early. I have a party trick I drag out for such occasions, a bit of a thumbnail of municipal administration as practised in Prince Edward County: I explain that the tax generated from residents has increased nearly fivefold in 25 years. And that the population hasn’t much changed since then.
Listeners blink a few times—waiting for the punchline that never comes. They understand the rate of taxation growth is much greater than inflation and the cost of living. They know things are more expensive, but not 4.7 times more costly since 1998. Have services quintupled? Has the quality improved five times? Population exploded?
By and large, the County is what the County was 25 years ago. The 25,000 people have mostly been replaced by richer folks who haven’t noticed—or don’t care—that it costs five times more now to keep the lights on at Shire Hall. It is changing this community.
When I tell this story, invariably, folks want to know how it happened.
I wish they had listened in on Committee of the Whole meeting last week. There were some clues.
The fire chief and a consultant had a fresh new plan to unveil. It sought to reorganize, amalgamate and consolidate County fire halls. (See story on page 3).
Every few years, another new plan is hatched inside the Picton fire station—each promising a better and more efficient fire response. This presentation was billed as the Fire Optimization Plan (a dubious bit of consultant- speak—for I suspect it isn’t fire this team was seeking to optimize). But word choices aside, let’s look at the ideas on the table.
Closing the Cressy fire hall was a hard no from the North Marysburgh councillor. So to was the notion of moving the Wellington fire hall out of the village and plunking it five kilometres north to Bowerman’s Corners (Cty. Rd. 1 and 2)—on land the County doesn’t own. There was more. The plan proposed amalgamating (always a fun word in Prince Edward County) Bloomfield and Milford to Cherry Valley. Ameliasburgh station would be deleted altogether.
The slide deck featured pretty coloured maps along with ambitious speculation presented as facts. With each deletion or relocation of an existing fire hall, the map got greener (green always equals better). But it seems there had been little consultation with the volunteer firefighters who mostly serve this rural community. Nor with residents impacted by such moves. No, this plan would live or die by the strength of the ideas, the weight of the evidence, and the persuasiveness of the fire chief and the consultant.
It wasn’t a fair fight.
Council was having none of it. Some members barely contained their hostility to the notion that closing fire halls would make fire response better. Why had no one thought to run some of these ideas by volunteer firefighters beforehand? Or residents?
The consultant struggled mightily to salvage his plan. But it was dead before he began speaking. An hour into the debate, Mayor Steve Ferguson suggested bringing the plan to the public—but there was no hope of breathing new life into this project.
So the County is paying for another plan that will go nowhere. This plan won’t even get the token nod of sitting on a shelf. It’s gone. Along with the thousands of dollars spent so far to write it.
Should Council have spent the entire $75,000 allotted for this plan before killing it? That would have served no one—except perhaps the consultant. Should it have spiked the plan earlier? Perhaps, but how would it know until it saw the plan? After all, Council had approved the funding for the plan at budget—where it had been characterized then as part of a compulsory reassessment of firefighting capacity (for a population that hasn’t grown). Could the plan have been saved from the dustbin? Likely not, as there was another question that hung over the meeting last week but wasn’t asked:
What is the problem this plan was seeking to solve? For without a solid and persuasive answer to this question, it all felt like makework and spendmoney.
In this 90-minute council discussion, County governance was laid bare. Too many big moving parts. Feeble execution. Poor communication. And a thick wad of cash, wasted. With seemingly no memory that we have done this very thing before. Many times.
I expect many large organizations to endure challenges. But something rather unique is going on here. Other orgs wouldn’t allow bad habits to spiral for 25 years. Other orgs would have installed checks and balances to stem runaway spending. Other orgs would tell the truth about what it can and cannot do. Other orgs would insist upon a governance group that demanded accountability and transparency from its leadership.
In Prince Edward County, we spend nearly five times in taxes as we did 25 years ago—serving the same number of residents. This is how we do it.
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