Right in the centre - Budgeting for better results
- Details
- Published on Friday, March 25, 2016
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
As municipal budgets fall into place this year, I strongly encourage people to go out to the public budget meetings.
Ask some questions, dig into the figures and see what your town or municipality is really doing. It will be an eye opener. You will be met with several surprises.
You will see many things being done that you had no idea about. You will also see many things being neglected that should be looked after. You will see budgets being delayed, year after year, until long into the budget year. Municipalities operate on a calendar year budgeting but it’s almost April and many budgets haven’t been passed yet. That doesn’t make sense.
The Town of Neepawa, a couple of years ago, decided to pre-approve a capital budget in the fall so as to be able to tender out projects earlier in the year. Not sure if that’s still happening, but it was a good theory. You will also find that municipalities have reserves and loans. They try to balance the budget somewhat to keep the tax rate as low as possible. It somehow doesn’t seem to work as, when combined with school taxes, the annual tax bill goes up almost without fail.
The Canadian Federation of Business has called municipalities out on their annual plea to the senior levels of government. Municipalities say they only get eight per cent of all the taxes collected in Canada. CFIB says that when you factor in federal and provincial grants, it’s actually 15 per cent. I don’t know if either of those figures are true, but I do know that municipalities are into a lot of stuff that maybe they shouldn’t be into.
One small example is that Neepawa almost bowed out of the Dutch Elm Disease control program. It’s not a huge amount of money, but maybe the time has come for somebody to investigate the effectiveness of the program. How effective have the rules been? No storing of elm firewood, burn the diseased trees. Ok, ok, I get it. But you can’t control the disease when trees are in inaccessible areas. The province also insists that we don’t plant American Elm trees any more. I think that’s just plain silly. We should be taking seed from the oldest, strongest, disease resistant trees and planting lots of elm trees.
Councils spend money on fluoridation of water. It’s plain dumb. There’s fluoride in toothpaste, there’s fluoridation at the dentist office. Fluoride may in fact be harmful. It costs unnecessary money at the treatment plants. You sure don’t need fluoridated water to process pork, to run a car wash or flush the toilet.
Many councils are insular in their approach to knowledge. Few councillors attend Federation of Canadian Municipalities meetings where some of the best practises are taught. Sometimes it seems that municipal and town councils don’t want information all that badly. While doing things in a traditional manner has some comforting strengths, it may well hamper innovation.
The biggest knock I have against municipalities and towns is they are too cautious.
Many towns, Neepawa included, are sitting on reserves. That’s a good thing, to a point, but investment in new infrastructure would be better. Towns, Neepawa included, are not utilizing their borrowing capacity. Neepawa has $2-3 million in borrowing capacity that they haven’t tapped into. If they had borrowed $2 million 20 years ago, it would have been paid off ten years ago and they would have had $2 million in improvements at 1996 prices. If it had been re-borrowed in 2006, they would have had another $2 million in improvements and at 2006 prices. Now they are faced with many millions in infrastructure shortfall with no more money to handle it than they had 20 years ago and they are going to have to make the improvements at 2016 prices. Interest rates are low, they should have made improvements at low interest rates.
One of the strengths of living in rural Manitoba is that change comes slowly. The biggest weakness of living in rural Manitoba is that nothing much changes. The original entrepreneurial spirit of our forefathers has been largely lost. Some of it died in WWI, some more of it died in the Great Depression of the 1930s, more of it may have died off in WWII. That said, all the people who lived through those events showed more developmental spirit than we have today. Maybe it’s the comfort zone of the 50s-70s that lulled us to sleep. The sleepy, foot-dragging pace of rural Manitoba, the creeping government off-loading of costs and services, the diminishing of our towns just won’t cut it. We are well on our way to having only three or four major towns in all of Western Manitoba. Late, low key, do nothing budgets simply won’t make our communities thrive.
We need a new government provincially, we need new approaches locally and we have to all understand that unless there is strongly evaluated change, the trend won’t change. All of us can name towns that used to be and are no more. It happened for a reason and many of the reasons rest within local control.
