A couple weeks ago, we spent around 14 hours sitting in the city council chambers for the budget deliberations, as our elected officials and administrative leadership sweated it out under the blazing lights of public scrutiny.
Apparently, we were lucky we had lights.
They looked like regular fluorescents to me but I guess they couldn’t be maintained. Parts were unavailable. There were vague murmurings they could quit at any moment. And as director of civic facilities Andy Beasley said, if they did quit, there wouldn’t be a budget to replace them. The council chambers could be immersed in indefinite darkness, and how would that serve public accountability?
The pressure was on to approve the $336,000 line item to replace the lighting in probably a 1,500 square foot room and an adjacent meeting room. And approved it was, although Coun. Kyle Sampson did propose a successful amendment to look at ways to reduce the cost.
Never mind reduce the cost. Those council chambers could be lit up at a tenth of the cost of what got approved. The price tag needed a complete overhaul.
But wasting money seems to be one thing our city is great at.
We had an entire fleet of dump trucks out last week hauling snow in 12 C heat. I guess they were in a rush to burn up that budget before the snow melted? Then we have the mowers on the boulevards I counted four times before the 1st of June last year. If you can believe this, I saw them mowing the lawns on Oct. 23.
More significantly, we keep approving irresponsible developments with stormwater management issues the rest of us have to subsidize to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
The consequences can’t be ignored for much longer. City taxes are going up 6.78 percent, part of a 20 percent increase over the past four years.
It’s not sustainable. But at times I’m not sure our council is all that concerned.
On one of the nights, Coun. Garth Frizzell left the meeting to teach a class. That left council without a tie breaker and the $270,000 CN Centre executive suite upgrade passed because of it.
But even if Frizzell’s schedule hadn’t got in the way, I’m not sure the process is set up to meaningfully reduce costs.
According to the 2022 city financial statements, if I counted it right, we have 168 city employees earning more than $100,000 a year. That’s almost half the total unionized workforce of 375.
I ascribe to the “public choice” theory of public administration: bureaucracy of any sort is naturally a parasitic entity whose primal drive is expansion. Its impulse is more employees, more management, more administration, more salaries, and more responsibilities.
I’m all for a well-paid, happy and effective bureaucracy but it’s the politician’s job to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand. There needs to always be a check on relentless bureaucratic creep.
That means tough questions, informed scrutiny, and a perhaps a bit more skepticism that those fancy bells and whistles, or in this case lights, are really needed.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
