The two entities at the centre of Wednesday's scathing report on municipal spending - municipal government and business - have dismissed the findings.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) said B.C. cities and towns were overspending, and Prince George was the worst of the province. According to the CFIB's third annual municipal spending study released yesterday, the city's operating spending growth was 3.87 times greater than population growth and inflation.
Both Mayor Dan Rogers and Chamber of Commerce president Roy Spooner have said the methodology in the CFIB's calculations was off base.
"The average person has neither the time nor the inclination to test the veracity of the truth, so the average person is merely incited to get upset, when they read a report like this one," Spooner said.
"I don't have any trouble with the newspaper reporting stories when they come up, but what is the Federation's motivation here? What are they getting out of publishing this report? I don't think they are doing something untoward, but I have no doubt they went into this with an agenda. What was it?"
Rogers said the CFIB authors seem to have included all city operational spending, which would include unforeseen costs, while weighing that against regular operational spending.
"The CFIB does some good work, but this is not one of those occasions," said Rogers.
"It fails to recognize unique circumstances. Mother Nature pays no attention to the rate of inflation when she sends us an ice jam, or forest fires, or a lot of snow, but we have to pay for those things. The situation is magnified by population growth pressures. Our costs go up and we have very little influence over that, but we have a shrinking tax base in Prince George."
The report looked from 2000 to 2008 and compared each city's spending with each city's growth in population coupled with inflation.
"It is old data, it is a very narrow criteria they use, it is not useful criteria that is tied to the realities of operating communities, and it is too simplistic in its recommendations," said Rogers.
More than half the city's budget gets handed over, before discretionary spending is considered, to policing costs (30 per cent), firefighting costs (15 per cent) and snow removal (10 per cent).
The amount paid to the police is fixed to the crime rate, not the population rate, said Rogers. The amount paid to firefighters is based on emergency response demands, no matter how many families moved in or out of the city in a given period.
"That ice jam cost city taxpayers somewhere between $6 million and $8 million so think of how the calculation would have changed had that not taken place," said Rogers, "but the quality of life in Prince George would still have the same requirements, so how can this particular piece of data really be relevant? And I suppose in 2009 the CFIB is going to say we were off base again because it cost us $6 million to remove the abnormal amount of snow we got."
Spooner said the report seems to have no bearing on the actual realities of whether a municipality is spending wisely.
"The real questions are, is there wasteful spending going on? Is the taxpayer paying more than they should for the services they are demanding? Compared to any community in B.C. our tax rates are not a problem," said Spooner.
"If you're a city with a million people or a city with 100,000 people, you have to both pay the same core costs, but the bigger city's cost per person is smaller because they can spread the tax burden out over a bigger base of people."
Spooner pointed to other more comprehensive studies - a couple done by the financial management firm KPMG - that lauded Prince George as having an excellent business climate.
last May, KPMG ranked Prince George the ninth best city in Canada for its overall tax structure after comparing more than 90 cities around the world and all of Canada's major centres.
And a few weeks ago, th CFIB reported that Prince George was one of the best in Canada, third best in B.C., for entrepreneurship.
The Citizen is involved in further examinations of our local government's rates of taxation and municipal spending. This will be revealed in the days ahead.
One calculation in advance of that (provided by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy which bills itself as a nonpartisan, independent think tank), shows that Prince George spent $6 million less on city operations than the average B.C. city in 2009 - $129 million to $135 million. Nonetheless, that was spread more thickly to the average household in Prince George. The average household here paid about $4,300 in local taxes last year while the provincial average was $3,886 per household.
