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•   StructurePolicy PrinciplesPriority AreasProvincial IssuesNational Issues

Policy Priority Area - Reform of Local Government

Improving the Efficiency and Accountability of Local Government in BC (2011)

Communities across BC are expressing a growing level of concern regarding budgeting and spending decisions that are resulting in increased property tax bills.  When we combine that with calls from local government for additional revenue streams to deal with pending infrastructure challenges the business community is expressing significant concern over the lack of transparency and accountability at the municipal level.

This concern not only speaks to the lack of transparency within many communities but also across the province. With 160 municipal governments, 27 regional districts and 231 Improvement Districts it is critical that there is an arms length mechanism to review how they interact with the population, stakeholders or higher levels of government regarding how they spend taxpayers money.

Many local government outputs - such as the services municipalities provide - are highly visible   On the other hand, local government processes - how decisions are made - may be quite opaque. This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the institutional incentives and information shortcuts that facilitate accountability at the provincial and national level are largely absent.

Challenges with the current system
Over recent years the Chamber has passed a number of resolution that recognize the concerns of the business community regarding specific aspects of what should be viewed as a systemic problem.  What has become apparent is that many of these challenges are truly provincial in that they are being expressed by communities of every size, in every region and irrespective of the economic base of the community profile.  These issues are clearly systemic and can be broadly summarized as;

• ability of local governments to provide virtually any service they desire through the Community Charter with no recourse for the business community;

• lack of accountability – low voter turnout means very little public scrutiny of councils decisions

• capacity – facing increasingly complex issues (social issues, homelessness) and struggling to deal with the challenges of an open, global economy

• funding – limited funding sources, how do municipalities utilized alternate service delivery in a way that protects the service while also protecting the municipality from too much risk?

Performance measurement
Municipal decision-makers want to be efficient and deliver value for local services. Taxpayers need to know how their tax dollars are spent and how their services compare both year-to-year and in relation to others.  The only way for this to occur is to determine what constitutes core services for municipalities and to provide a comparable cost for these services – something that does not exist at present in BC. 

This does not mean that the Chamber advocates that local governments should only provide a static set of core services.  Rather the Chamber believes that there are a range of common services that can effectively be measured based on objective, result based criteria.

Performance measurement is not new. It has been in place for several years in different forms in many jurisdictions around the world. Every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a policy at the national level supporting performance measurement. In the United States, the federal government and more than 30 states have legislated performance measurement for their departments and agencies. In Canada, the federal government, eight provinces, (including BC), and two territories have formal systems of performance measurement.

While the Chamber recognises that the Community Charter does place some reporting requirements under Division 5 – Reporting of the Charter (1) these are extremely limited.  Indeed, the Charter goes no further than to require that;

(2) The annual report must include the following:
(c) a report respecting municipal services and operations for the previous year;
(d) a progress report respecting the previous year in relation to the objectives and measures established for that year under paragraph (f);
(f) a statement of municipal objectives, and the measures that will be used to determine progress respecting those objectives, for the current and next year

The Chamber does not believe that this goes far enough in introducing a level of accountability and scrutiny to municipal decision making. Just as importantly it does not encourage best practices between municipalities, nor provide individual municipalities with the tools and resources they need to inform decision making to better serve their communities.

While the Chamber recognises the difficulty in comparing municipality to municipality given variations in geography, economic base, population and a range of other factors there are ‘core’ services provided by local governments that can be benchmarked and measured against common goals and criteria.

Indeed if we look to Ontario we see the development of a system that measures 54 performance measures across 12 core municipal service areas.  These service areas are;

• Local Government
• Fire
• Police
• Roadways
• Transit
• Sewage
• Water
• Garbage
• Parks and recreation
• Libraries
• Planning
• Other.

These service areas are then further broken down into sub-measures which are measured against objective criteria regarding their efficiency of effectiveness.

Fire
2.1
a) Operating costs for fire services per $1,000 of assessment.
b) Total costs for fire services per $1,000 of assessment.
2.2 Number of residential fire related civilian injuries per 1,000 persons.
2.3 Number of residential fire related civilian injuries averaged over 5 years per 1,000 persons.
2.4 Number of residential fire related civilian fatalities per 1,000 persons.
2.5 Number of residential fire related civilian fatalities averaged over 5 years per 1,000 persons.
2.6 Number of residential structural fires per 1,000 households.(2)

The province already has comprehensive performance measures across all Ministries.  These measures ensure that government remains accountable to clients and the public.  More importantly the information allows government to improve outcomes and inform and enhance decision making and the utilization of scarce resources.  The Chamber believes these outcomes would be beneficial to local governments as well.

Local governments are correct to state that the financial challenges they face are significant and only going to become more acute as we look to upgrade our aging infrastructure.  With limited financial resources and with only one taxpayer it seems critical that the first step to addressing local governments fiscal challenges is ensuring that they have the appropriate measures and tools to make well informed, focused decisions that are driven by outcomes and efficiencies within and between municipalities rather than simply providing additional revenue.

The Chamber believes that this would be achieved through a mandatory reporting system on predetermined core services.  Such a requirement would go a long way towards providing the tools needed by local government to better serve their communities while also developing a culture of sound fiscal decision making while promoting balance between the level of taxes paid and the services consumed.

THE CHAMBER RECOMMENDS

That the Provincial Government work with UBCM and the Chamber to develop;

1. benchmarking system that outlines core services that are applicable across municipalities of every size, of every economic base and of all regions of the province; and

2. core metrics based on appropriate measures (per population, per dollar expended etc) that allow for cross-municipal comparisons;

Footnotes