Abbotsford scraps Core Review and puts P3 on hold
Thursday, April 25, 2013 @ 3:45 AM
By Peter Ewart
Abbotsford City Council, acting on the advice of new city manager George Murray, has decided to scrap its Core Services Review. The Core Services Review would have cost over $200,000 for this municipality of 133,000 residents.
In what appears to be a carefully phrased statement, the city manager noted in his report to Council that "a number of other local governments, including Penticton, Prince George, Summerland, Fraser Valley Regional District and Mission have undertaken Core Services Reviews of late. While these Core Services Reviews all produced measurable improvements, the local governments have mixed reviews about the actual ‘return on investment’ derived from the reviews".
Instead, as an alternative, city manager Murray will conduct an internal service review himself. Mayor Bruce Banman fully supports the city manager’s proposal. He notes that "Part of his [the city manager’s] regular duties would be to go through every single department and budget within the city anyway… We can save the taxpayers about 250 thousand dollars by having him doing the work rather than an outside firm" (Country 107.1, April 15).
The idea of municipalities conducting internal service reviews of their own is not new, of course, having been done in Williams Lake and other centres in previous years. Indeed, the idea was also put forward as an alternative to the recent City of Prince George Core Services Review. But PG Council decided to go ahead with an external Review, carried out by the consulting firm KPMG, for a cost of $328,000. As Ben Meisner has pointed out in a previous article (250News, April 10, 2013), so far the results of the Prince George Core Review, despite the hefty cost, have not been impressive.
In a related development, George Murray has also announced that a multi-million dollar P3 project put forward two years ago has been postponed indefinitely by City Council pending the outcome of the internal services review. The $35 million project was aimed at building a new recreation facility for Abbotsford and would involve a P3 agreement between the City of Abbotsford and the Vancouver YMCA. The City of Abbotsford was supposed to contribute up to $17.5 million to the project. However, it has received opposition in the community from some residents. Murray says, "Money is always an issue … Part of my review is ‘can the city afford it?’ We still haven’t answered that question" (Abbotsford Times, April 11).
Mayor Banman was elected mayor of Abbotsford in 2011. An important plank of his campaign was opposition to a proposed $291 million P3 privatization of the city’s water supply which was supported by the previous mayor and the federal government. To pay for the controversial project, the City would have had to borrow a whopping $230 million. In the 2011 vote, Banman won the mayoralty position and the privatization proposal was voted down (74% of voters were against).
Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
Comments
Wow! The Abbotsford city council should all be locked in in jail. Who do they think they are? Damn socialists not just throwing their money away to private business for nothing! They even quoted that trouble maker from 250.
Wow, maybe there is some sense in this country. An internal review, you don’t say. The managers of an organization, with intimate knowledge of operations, working together to find efficiency and cost savings. What a concept. Should be standard operating procedure all the time.
Any fool who agrees to turn over their water utility to private hands, deserves to lose their home and I hope that is what happens to them. It takes very little smarts to realize what should and should not be privatized. Anything to do with basic human rights and health shall not be given over to private self interests.
Wow, maybe there is some sense in this country. An internal review, you don’t say. The managers of an organization, with intimate knowledge of operations, working together to find efficiency and cost savings. What a concept. Should be standard operating procedure all the time.
Good to see the City of Abbotsford has some good sense.
P3 projects especially concerning City infrastructure should be avoided like the plague. Municipalities that go down the P3 road put their citizens in debt for years, and years, and at the end of the day end up with less services.
We need to reduce spending in other areas, reduce the cost of running the City, and spend this money on infrastructure, and we need to do it now.
Selling of City assets like the swimming pool, civic centre, and Pine Valley Golf Course is not a solution. The solution is to find ways to make these facilities pay for themselves. This could be done with those people at City Hall, ie; Mayor, Council, City Manager, and Staff, getting serious about making the proper decisions.
Before we all go off the deep end and praise the hell out og another municipal government, lets lool a little closer.
Its a new bunch who are taking over for the old bunch. The old bunch ran huge defecits and made bad decisions for the area. The Heat is one of them. Who wants to watch Calgary’s farm team in the Fraser Valley. And their losses are all guaranteed by the tax payers of Abbotsford. Wish I had that business. Do nothing, lose money and get someone else to pay for it.
P3s are definitely not the answer to municipal cost savings. Electing representatives who know how to apply common sense and not spend beyond the City’s ability to pay is what is needed. Year after year we see the City of PG adding to the already high debt load for items and pet projects that are nice to have but not urgently needed, then they run to the taxpayers crying about how there is never enough money for basic infrastructure needs like road repairs. A perfect scenario of not having their priorities straight or a solid long term fully costed plan in place for running the city.
Its pretty obviouse that the huge cost to running the City is:
1. Salaries and costs for Police, Firemen, City Administration, and labour.
2. Recreation and Parks.
3. Debt carrying charges. (We owe over $100 Million and the cost of servicing this debt is in access of $15 Million per year)
Those are the big three, and they can all be reduced if the City applied itself to solve the problem. However it seems it is more important to host the Winter Games (tax us an additional $15 Million to cover the cost) then to continue to support the building of a Performing Arts Centre, which will cost us (City portion) approx. $15 Million dollars.
In addition we gifted the property from the PG Hotel to the Province for the WIDC, and picked up the cost of demolition, and cleaning up the site. This costs us approx. $3 Million, and God knows what else we will get stuck for.
Time for those people at City Hall to wake up and smell the roses.
“3. Debt carrying charges. (We owe over $100 Million and the cost of servicing this debt is in access of $15 Million per year)”
Palopu, those are not the debt servicing charges. Those are the cost of the payment on principle plus interest. The interest on a hundred million should be less than a third of that.
The choice is this. Don’t build a thing until all debt is removed. Then start saving so that anything new gets built with savings. Taxes will still be required to accumulate the savings.
In the meantime, the city infrastructure will fall down around us.
Cameron Stolz will have his way with the levy from the 2015 winter Olympics. Keep collecting it after the 2015 Olympics on the hush. Because I know how he thinks this is what I suspect he will try to do. Funding the PAC is how he will try to justify it. IMO
Gus. I agree that debt servicing is principle plus interest, however it still takes a big chunk out of the budget every year.
I don’t really see any change to this if the City continues to borrow. Even if they don’t borrow, but take all the money from land sales, and spend it on capital projects, we still lose.
We need to make a concerted effort to pay down the debt, and quit spending money on unnecessary projects, until we get things under control.
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