It's about time.
City council is meeting this Monday morning at 830 a.m. to get cracking on which recommendations of the core services review to implement, armed with a detailed staff report on how to do it. The 120-page report is important because it lets mayor and council know how good or bad the medicine would taste with each recommendation. In other words, what are the real-world implications should these suggestions become policy. Rather than making decisions and letting staff figure it out after the fact, this report lets council know what the process would actually look like.
Even without this report, council has already decided to drop numerous recommendations, including not selling Pine Valley (at least for now), not reducing the size of council, not contracting out parking enforcement, not adding a fee for extra garbage at the curb and not charging a fee to clear the snow windrows left across residential driveways.
The 18 recommendations left, from the 40 in the KPMG report, were passed on to city staff. This report, however, does not just provide details on what it would look like to implement these recommendations and the estimated $12.3 million in savings it would bring. The staff plan goes back to the original KPMG report and even considers the ideas that had been rejected.
On one hand, that sounds like a make-work project but it's actually a sober, second look at KPMG's work by the seasoned bureaucrats who would actually have the job of turning these recommendations into reality.
This final document gives council everything it needs to make significant change to city government. The consultant has spoken with an outsider's perspective on what should be considered, the public has given its input on what it would like to see and now staff have put into writing how to make it all happen.
The decisions now ahead for council will be to prioritize the remaining recommendations and then pick which ones to bring in. This is what the public has been waiting for since this mayor and council were elected nearly 20 months ago - meaningful action to address soaring operational costs and the soaring tax increases that have come with them.
Expect some city land to be sold.
Expect user feers, which is another form of taxation when all is said and done, to rise substantially.
Expect third-party operators to be brought in for various city services and operations (unions call that "contracting out").
Most importantly, expect change that will be almost impossible for any future mayor and council to undo. Once the land is sold, the city won't be buying it back and it likely won't be going out to buy more. Higher and more numerous user fees will become the new normal, as will third-party operators.
These changes will be permanent and they will reshape the expectations residents will have about what municipal government is obligated to supply, what it isn't, where there is free access and where there isn't.
These decisions won't be easy, nor will they be painless, as the staff report makes clear, but they are necessary. Annual city tax increases of four and five per cent are not sustainable when most annual wage increases are in the 1.5 per cent range, never mind the seniors on fixed pensions.
It's about time it's decision time.
But take a deep breath, Prince George, because it's going to hurt.
