"The current approach has been to tighten belts."
- Hizzonor, the Mayor
My belt's out of holes. There's nothing left to tighten. I notched down a hole or two when the stealth budget slid under the radar a couple of years ago, another after the two-fer budget before the Olympics. The mayor and council dismissing as "tokenism" the idea of leading by example and foregoing their own pay raises pissed me off enough I punched right through the leather where there had been no hole. I have more belt hanging outside the buckle than around my waist.
Time for a new belt.
But right now, I'm not sure I want to spend money on a new belt. With no automatic pay raise on the horizon funds are, how shall I put this, a lot tighter than my belt. Besides, the old one still holds up my jeans. With a sharp knife I can cut off the part that dangles comically down my leg. If I carefully hone the barrel of the empty Bic pen I found the other day I can probably punch a new hole or two further into the leather. Heck, with a little ingenuity and a make-do attitude I'm sure I can make this belt last a lot longer than most of our decision makers are likely to be making decisions for us.
Or I could adopt the RMOW strategy. I could hire a consultant - no, maybe two consultants - to study the problem, work up a comprehensive trouser-retention plan, hire a marketing firm to ask a cross-section of the community what they should think about the plan, strike a task force to discuss the desirable outcomes of the plan, let the plan languish in departmental infighting for a couple of years, rehire the consultants to update the plan and, finally, hire a couple of new staff to execute the plan and report back to council on its success.
Screw it. I'm just gonna see if there are any suspenders at the Re-Use-It Centre.
We're deep into Adventures in Budgetland. The continuing saga of straw men, horny dilemmas and This Year's Unexpected Shortfall - I'm shocked, shocked to discover transit costs are up and parking revenue is down - has settled on our happy mountain home as predictably as the stormy snows of December. Just as predictably, we're faced with the tired old saw about raising taxes or cutting services. That box seems to get smaller each year, while the likelihood our leaders will begin to think outside it vanishes like a cheap magician's trick.
The public's last kick at the budget cat will be Monday, Dec. 13 th . Recognizing no one is likely to have anything else going on 12 days before Christmas, the second and last Budget Open House - also known as The Illusion of Participation - will convene between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. at Spruce Grove Field House. If you'd like to know more about where your money's going, why you're going to pay more taxes and higher user fees and get fewer services, come on out. Rumour has it Vancouver Coastal Health, who have so thoroughly screwed up the Great Helipad Debacle, will be on hand to pass out Prozac in an attempt to mend fences with the community and dampen demand for Budget Rage helivacs to the emergency room.
Since we're raising taxes and cutting services, one wonders exactly how decisions are made to cut services. Undoubtedly consultants were hired to develop sophisticated algorithms, apply heuristic evaluation techniques and push the frontiers of quantitative easing to identify those programs - library hours, free Lost Lake Monday evening skiing - most popular with the public while simultaneously being least likely to have any real effect on the Unexpected Budget Shortfall.
Absent from any consideration, of course, was doing what virtually every municipality across North America and much of the rest of the world is doing... freezing salaries, cutting staff and, horrors, actually reducing wages. We can't do this. We have a Contract. Well, we don't actually, but let's say we do because it's really a lot easier that way and, after all, defends the Vital Self-Interest.
Also absent is any consideration of how we might go about leveraging our position as a desirable tourist destination to raise revenues. That's a box not even on the horizon.
So we're left with cuts. Not cuts to Frivolous Expenditures that haven't done a damn thing to make life better in Tiny Town. What kind of Expenditures? Well, for example, there was the $178K we paid to consultants to tell us it would cost us a bazillion dollars to move a mobile asphalt plant. Or the nearly $600K we paid our lawyers for their flip-floppery on the same subject... and other vital services. (Note: the current line on the Rainbow lands expropriation lawsuit being next year's Unexpected Budget Shortfall is currently 8:5.) Eliminating or reducing either of those would have kept the lights on at the library for, oh, another decade.
But hey, the past is the past. The best we can hope for is to learn from our mistakes. Okay, the best we can hope for is to reduce the cost of our mistakes when we make the same ones over and over again... adjusted for inflation.
But where, oh where, can we possibly cut next year's budget without tightening our belt so much it becomes a full-body tourniquet?
How about some or all of:
• $50K for the continuation of the Lost Lake Trail program. Arguably we need even more Zappa trails. But I bet we could delay them a few years
• $50K to plan the Lost Lake bridge replacement this year, $450K to do it next year, simply proving the point that once you build it, it continues to be expensive forever.
• $300K for village enhancement. Just screams hotel tax, doesn't it?
• $2.9Milllllllion for Cheakamus Park. WTF, they've already got an asphalt plant they fought so hard to keep in place.
• $75K reno on the Passive House. I thought that was a gift. Some gift.
• $160K for the Sea-to-Sky Trail. It's been in the works forever; another year or 10 delay isn't really going to matter.
• $25K for a consultant to consult on the prior consultants consultancy about a retail strategy. Here's a retail strategy: cut taxes and help store owners stay in business! Dairy Queen my ass.
• $30K for, you guessed it, a consultant to conduct an "organizational assessment to ensure the RMOW is well-positioned to adapt to future trends and meet future challenges facing the resort community." Bankruptcy, for example.
• $350K for jail cell upgrade and its predictable consultants. Only if we can choose the first tenants.
Any fat in the budget? You decide. No, I have a better idea. Let's build a $7 million drive-up Visitor Amenity Hub.
God help us.
