Now There’s a Thought – Let’s Look at Our Spending
The blog has been quiet for a few weeks. Andrea and I took advantage of a Via Rail seat sale which nicely coincided with her return to good health, to go to Ontario for a couple of weeks to visit family and friends.
On the agenda for my first council meeting back, there was a report on various tax tools that we could use to get more money out of tax-payers' pockets. I saw this as an opportunity to suggest that, instead of thinking that our only solution to financial problems is to hit up the taxpayer, we could instead examine how we currently spend money, and see if there are efficiencies to be found there.
I suggest this every year as we're going through the budget process. Every year this suggestion has been ignored by most members of council. The assumption has been that we will continue to spend money as we've always spent it, even though, when times are tough, we might not need to spend $40,000 each year on floral decorations, for example. But we don't even discuss the necessity of such expenditures, or even if we could spend less, or if there are alternatives to having barrels of petunias set out on Memorial Square.
Imagine my surprise, when other members of council thought that this might be a valuable exercise (although a couple were of the opinion that this is already happening), and we have agreed to ask the city manager to prepare a report on how we could do this, and what processes other municipalities have used in such reviews. Coincidentally, this was also the topic of a panel discussion at the pre-Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) meeting that many senior staff attended in Saskatoon this week, so they should already have picked up some valuable ideas that they can use.