Something has to give.
Another three per cent municipal tax hike this year (or five per cent for those who thought they were getting back the two per cent increase for the 2015 Canada Winter Games). Continuous increases to utility fees, airport improvement fees and other user fees imposed by multiple levels of government forgetting that a) there is only one taxpayer, and b) the proper name for a government-imposed fee on individuals is "tax."
This unsustainable governing model is slamming into another equally unsustainable reality at the local level. Crumbling municipal infrastructure. High public sector wages and benefits. Declining levels of essential government services combined with mounting public demands for new services and new infrastructure.
The signs are everywhere.
The provincial government unveils new funds to address transportation issues on Highway 16 to protect vulnerable women from joining the tragic list of missing and murdered. Municipal governments will help. A noble, long overdue act but where will the money come from? What service or job will be cut or what tax will be raised to pay for it?
In Prince George, the fire department and the RCMP are sounding the alarm about staffing levels.
City council received a report on Monday that said the last time 14 local firefighters attended a structure fire within eight minutes - a staffing level and response time considering the gold standard to save a building and the possible occupants inside it - was more than two years ago. The department only hit the target eight times out of 248 fires between 2009 and 2014.
In that same time period, the value of fire losses in Prince George totalled $192 million. In Kamloops, it was $21 million.
The report calls for a replacement of the ancient Fire Hall #1 downtown and the hiring of up to 20 more firefighters.
If the new RCMP detachment is any indication, a state-of-the-art fire hall will be built but it won't be cheap. Corners will be cut everywhere - some good, some not, some opportunities missed - by earnest politicians eager to keep costs down.
Hiring more firefighters will be equally challenging. Last fall, RCMP Supt. Warren Brown asked for seven additional cops over a three-year period, starting with three in 2016. He got his three for this year but by a 5-3 vote, with the minority wanting to provide only two. As a whole, city council made no promises for more officers in coming years.
That was the first time the city approved hiring more uniformed members since 2009.
Behind the scenes, the city has been paying a hefty annual overtime bill at both the police and fire departments for years.
Violent crime is down but property crime and other petty offences are up, with the corner of Third and George, ironically the home of the Prince George courthouse, being the epicentre for 1,731 calls last year in the downtown, Brown told city council this week.
More cops. More firefighters. Better coverage. Modern facilities. These are all reasonable requests for government dollars.
Demanding government become much more stingy with those dollars and start holding the line on tax increases is also a reasonable request. Households adapt their spending as circumstances change but governments move far slower, if at all. Once jobs and wages and programs are approved, they usually grow and rarely shrink or disappear, even when their redundancy or irrelevancy is clear to all. Government has done a good job of holding the line on wages for front-line civil servants over the last decade but many of those wages are still higher than what someone doing a comparable job in the private sector receives and public sector pension and benefit packages are still the best out there.
Yet when governments do give tax breaks or trim the number of bureaucrats and the services they provide, they are simultaneously praised and vilified.
There seems to be no path forward.
Governments and taxpayers are colliding with great force but agonizingly slow, tectonic plates grinding relentlessly into each other.
Something has to give.
