Moncton compares police costs

Published Friday April 2nd, 2010 by brent mazerolle Times & Transcript Staff

Moncton's city manager Jacques Dubé says his staff is now running three parallel investigations so they can advise Moncton city council on the ramifications of changing the city's policing model. Frustrated by years of rising costs it feels it has had inadequate control over, council voted this week to give notice to the provincial and federal governments that it wants out of the contract that has brought the Codiac Regional RCMP to the city, as well as Riverview and Dieppe. Also this week, council gave itself a three-month deadline to unravel the Gordian knot that has been the policing issue. Whatever the progress made or not made by that date, council is hoping to take a page from Alexander the Great and cut right through it in one bold stroke, putting the issue to rest.

Therefore, Dubé's staff has been further investigating the three options on the table, checking consultants' findings, seeking out police officers with senior management experience in the event the city grows its own municipal force, and preparing for a now-planned April 13 meeting with Dieppe and Riverview on tri-community cost-sharing. Some of the work already done is summarized in a chart accompanying this article. On the topic of the cost-sharing formula, the Codiac costs in the chart assume the current formula. If Moncton's share was reduced in a new agreement to replace the one that expires this year, those numbers would drop. That brings up an interesting calculation. Moncton currently accounts for roughly 65 per cent of the population of Metro Moncton but pays roughly 75 per cent of the cost of the Codiac Regional RCMP that polices Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview.

Assuming that the other two communities were to accept more costs in the name of maintaining the regional police force whose service most of their citizens have been happy with, you might guess a negotiation could ultimately split the difference between 65 and 75, with Moncton then required to pay 70 per cent. There are problems with that scenario, of course. Police cost-sharing agreements generally are based on more than just population counts, and all three communities have argued at times they're paying too much. But if Moncton did end up paying a 70 per cent share, Codiac's per capita cost ends up right in line with the other two options, working out to about $305 per capita. Would that be enough to convince Moncton council to return to the Codiac policing model, or are other grievances with RCMP costs going to carry the day? The answer is yet to be determined.

The only option that frees Moncton from paying RCMP costs like their pro-rated shares that go to help fund the provincial RCMP and things like the training depot in Regina is to go it alone. However, city staff have found three aspects to creating a municipal police force that have not gotten much attention in the past month's worth of discussions, but should. First of all, the startup costs which police consultants Perivale and Taylor estimated at $5 million to $7 million (an estimate they said might be low) for the most part can't be amortized under Canadian rules of the accounting profession and government, because the bulk are considered operational expenses rather than capital assets. The city already owns a police headquarters and can lease police cars through the Municipal Capital Borrowing Board, but most of the other transition costs it would face are the soft ones like training, project management of the transition, and IT services. Dubé says even the things that seem like hard assets -- police uniforms, radios, weapons and body armour -- aren't necessarily considered capital assets under the accounting rules. That's why it advised council this week much of the start-up cost would have to be borne in a one-time property tax increase that could raise the tax rate anywhere from 12 to 14 cents per $100 of assessed value, a politically unpalatable prospect in the short term, whatever the long-term gain might be.

The City of Moncton's director of information systems, Dan Babineau, has also raised a significant red flag. His staff has been looking at the costs of buying the sorts of policing programs the RCMP uses (which are their own proprietary software) and then migrating the data from the RCMP system to a Moncton municipal system. Babineau estimates that could cost $2 million, which was not figured in the Perivale and Taylor estimate. Would savings realized from being able to use the current Codiac building and paying officers less than what RCMP members make, plus avoiding the pro-rated contributions to the larger RCMP machinery, be enough to offset that? It's a calculation still to be done.But on the topic of salaries, there's a third red flag. Dubé says one of the appeals of a municipal force is that council would have more say in salaries, but it's not that simple. The fact that market forces would come to bear on salaries has been discussed by council in recent weeks, but what hasn't is the fact police and firefighter salaries in New Brunswick are determined through binding arbitration, not collective bargaining.