At last night's Public Budget Meeting - during discussions, Williams Lake City Councillor Sue Zacharias raised the point if the City should just look to the private sector for its' equipment needs, rather than lease/buy its fleet requirements... which lead into a brief discussion between her and Councillor Rathor about the merits around privatization of City Services... and the fact privatization did not work for School District #27 years ago...
Meanwhile - City Staff reports that as of December 31st, 2010 - the City had just $420,000 in the Equipment Reserve. City Staff had also warned Council that it should consider looking into leasing Fleet Vehicles via the Municipal Finance Authority...
Councillor Zacharias raises a good point but we should go further... Council should permit the community on Jan 31st to ask questions about the 2012 Provisional Operations/Capital budgets to ask questions like:
* Are existing service levels sufficient for the community? More? Less?
* Capital projects - what should Council focus on in 2012?
If there are less services then Staff would have to come to Council, behind closed doors, and state what less City services looks like in terms of staffing levels...
This very question faced Prince George Council who made the tough decision this past week to lay off a number of City Staff people there - read more here. Meanwhile PG City Councillor Brian Skakun disagreed with his Council with the layoffs and wished that more public discussion took place before the layoffs had occurred - read more here
I'd like to see Council turn the budget process into a "community-building" exercise to ensure the budget reflects the public's will rather than Council saying "this is what we think the public will tolerate".
One final point - one day, the community will have to discuss the idea around perpetual tax increases and at what point will the community say "enough is enough" and cut back as much as necessary to hold taxes at a certain threshold (0-2% for example) ... however keeping in mind the RCMP alone represents about 30% of the entire City operations budget & the City has little say there in terms of costs and the CAO (B. Carruthers) states that Council's budget does not have a lot of fat left to cut...
Again - if you have time, please come on Jan 31st at 6:00pm in WL Council Chambers and observe the presentation of the 2012 Draft Operations/Capital Budgets for the City of Williams Lake
SBF
2 comments:
The CAO needs to quit defending his empire and start to work off of ideas put forth by people such as Councillor Zacharias to cut costs for the taxpayer.
Is it prudent to get rid of ALL city equipment? Probably not but could we cut some and contract it out? Most likely yes.
In my opinion, other than emergency city works staff/equipment all else should be looked at. This includes non emergency water and sewer work from new service connections to snow removal to turning off city water. (I found out about the city bylaw that only city staff can turn off water when I had a plumbing issue a few years back. The plumber was at my house ready to work but has to sit and wait until the city worker arrived and did the 30 second job. The plumber is a certified tradesperson, is there not a way to let them turn off water?)
All landscaping, lawn mowing, flower planting, watering. Rec services such as fitness classes, IT computer services, engineering and mechanics.
I know what some people such as the CAO are going to say as to why we can't do something. But everything can be done, for example:
1: City staff has to do snowplowing so it gets done right and keeps our citizens safe.
In my opinion a private contractor such as Interior Roads could do just as good a job as city staff. The province contracts out it's roads to the private sector. Why not the city?
Private mechanics could also do the job of city mechanics as even the ambulance service contracts out their repairs to the private shops. etc, etc.
2: We have staff here anyways to do emergency work so why not have them do other things as well?
Good in theory but thats how the empire grows out of hand. Say you have a core group of 6 city employees to do emergency work.
The city managers say when there is no emergency lets have them do maintenance as well instead of sitting around. Now the day comes where they have an emergency come up while they are in the middle of replacing a sewer line. Can't do both because we are understaffed, lets hire more people. Now more people are hired and need to keep busy when there are no emergencies or maintenance to be done so they start delivering more and more services that private contractors could be doing much more efficiently.
Now lets turn to positions such as the Communications Coordinator. Not saying he is doing a bad job but is sending a one paragraph update every other day really a full time position? Even the Prince George city council made fun of Williams Lake for doing this.
The arts center coordinator. Not only do I find it completely unfair that painters, weavers and potters get a place to practice their craft when my wife, who makes jewlery, does not. But now the taxpayer is to foot the bill for a coordinator for them? They should not only pay for the coordiantor themselves if they need one but also fair market rent for the old firehall.
Wrestling Day. Why is that that when local business men started wrestling day they did so because there were no shoppers in their stores. They closed their doors and did not get paid. This is still the choice local businesses can make today. Why is it that city hall and staff can take this extra day off and are still paid to do so by the taxpayer? I don't really care if they take the day off but why are we paying them to do so? No other city has this statutory holiday for city staff courtesy of the taxpayer.
I've just scratched the surface of cost cutting measures that must be looked into. Am I alone or does anyone else agree?
Your ideas are interesting but somewhat simplistic.
Privitization of services may be cheaper on the surface but often (and this has been proven time and again) you pay more in the end and you get less service. Look no further than the Coqihalla Highway...you will not convince any comercial truck driver on that road that private highway service is better. That's just one small example. Sometimes private can do a good job but it's simply not a huge cost savings and almost always is not "quality" work. Are there good example of privitization? Sure there are, but it's far from the cure to all that ills.
On a few points you are lacking some reserach.....The Arts Centre Coordinator for example is not coming out of city coffers...that's a CRD function. Sure City taxpayers contribute to the CRD but they are seperate organizations and you were on about the City.
On some points you're mis-informed....Prince George City Council did not make fun of our Communications Coordinator position..that was actually the PG Free Press, and you'd be interested to know the fellow who wrote that article used to work for the fellow here...sour grapes...you bet!
In general I see your points...it's never a bad thing to look at the way business is being done. To simply say it can be done better just because City employees are doing it is narrow-minded.
As for Wrestling Day...I'm still confused by that one myself!
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