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Ding-dong! The CSR is dead!

The long nightmare is over. Mayor Shari Green's not-so-brilliant idea to drag the city through a core services review finally died a quiet but well-deserved death Wednesday.

The long nightmare is over.

Mayor Shari Green's not-so-brilliant idea to drag the city through a core services review finally died a quiet but well-deserved death Wednesday. The select committee in charge of the entire core review process, including bringing forward the best of the review's recommendations, has met for the last time.

The idea of an external review was fine in theory but the timing and circumstances were all wrong. Looking at other communities across B.C. and Canada that have gone through a core service review, it takes political will, a unified city council and some intestinal fortitude to follow through on the recommendations. There's simply no point in holding a core review unless there is a real appetite to make the kind of deep cuts these kind of reviews always suggest.

To varying degrees, Green and her council talked a good game about bringing fiscal order to municipal spending and staffing levels, particularly during the 2011 election, but seemed averse to spilling blood, which is what happens when knives are used.

As a result, when the select committee punted the 40 best ideas from the consultant's review to council for consideration, the majority of those recommendations were voted down. They included:

- closing and selling the Pine Valley golf course

- reducing the size of city council

- outsourcing parking enforcement

- reducing the level of snow and ice clearing at civic facilities to match those in the rest of the city

- establishing a fee for extra garbage at the curb

- charging a fee for removing snow windrows from driveways

- reducing transit service and using smaller vehicles

- reducing streetsweeping

- reducing hours at local arenas

- outsourcing grass cutting in parks and on boulevards

Other suggestions were dismissed because city council had already dealt with them or was in the process of dealing with them. For example, the review suggested the city save itself $25,000 per year by remove its funding for the Little Prince steam train in Fort George Park. City council's response was to enshrine that funding in the annual budget.

Seeing how cavalier council was with rejecting the review's recommendations, new city manager Beth James has all but ignored the consultant's report, going in her own direction with restructuring and finding internal efficiencies and savings.

And that's the disdain the core services review deserves. The City of Prince George paid KPMG the same amount of money that the City of Toronto paid KPMG for its review and received the same recommendations to cut jobs, slashing service levels, gas expensive programs that give little return and then jack up user fees across the board.

The only difference between the two reports were details specific to the jurisdiction.

Mayor and city council could have saved about $350,000 by reading KPMG's report to Toronto and then asking senior city staff to assess the value of selling city lands, reducing snow plowing and garbage collection, contracting out maintenance work, boosting user fees and so on, as well as provide various implementation options.

Furthermore, even if there was something worth doing in the Prince George-specific recommendations, they were still brought forward by only assessing their fiscal value, without considering their social, cultural or broader economic value to the community. In other words, they were made with no context.

Mayor and council were hoping for some answers to the complicated problems facing them. What they got was a cookie-cutter report that admittedly did have some interesting but half-baked ideas (that phrase seems to be going around this week) to make some real cuts and enjoy some real savings.

Unfortunately, city council was unable to screw their courage - and the budgetary knife - to the sticking place.