Report rates city second for municipal spending

Bruce Walkinshaw - Penticton Western News Published: December 07, 2010 6:00 PM
The latest annual report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business shows the City of Penticton’s spending growth compared to inflation and population is the second largest for a major municipality in the province. This is just another indication that the job cutting and restructuring that has taken place at the city is prudent, according to Mayor Dan Ashton.  The report which used statistics from 2000 to 2008 — the latest available, it said — found that municipal operating spending across B.C. grew by 58 per cent, while population and inflation grew by only 29 per cent, meaning that municipal spending exceeded population and inflation growth by 201 per cent. According to the report, among the municipalities with populations over 25,000 people, Prince George’s operating spending growth was the highest at 3.87 times greater than population and inflation growth. Penticton was not far behind at 3.56. On the other end of the spectrum, Kelowna was fourth lowest at 2.02, while Kamloops tied with Surrey for lowest at 1.90.

Some critics have noted the report is not entirely fair with its comparison because in the last decade higher levels of government have downloaded responsibility and control of providing services to the public, while also allowing access to new forms of revenue to pay for the services, in order to facilitate more localized strategies to providing them.Meanwhile, Ashton asserted the specific comparison of Penticton to other municipalities may not be completely fair either as Penticton provides valued services or operates facilities — such as its electric utility, the trade and convention centre, the water filtration plant and now the South Okanagan Events Centre — which others do not. Facilities like those, he said, could have required more operating expense while bringing in more revenue or economic benefit to the community. Furthermore, Ashton said with Penticton’s roughly 33,000 population, it is probably quite a bit smaller than other municipalities which own such facilities, thus a necessary industry-wide increase in operating spending would have a larger impact on the overall budget of Penticton compared to a larger city with a larger budget.

Having said that, Ashton said overall he is onside with the report. He said as a city councillor he often voted against the civic budgets that make up the report’s statistics.  “We didn’t need to address the structural internal deficit by continuing to increase taxes, and that is the prime reason that I would vote against the budgets,” said Ashton.  “We were not opening up those budgets the way they should have been opened up, the way that (the current council) started opening them up two years ago.”  Ashton said he is not blaming previous councils as they were making their decisions under significantly different economic conditions.  “The world changed in 2008 for everybody and everybody has had to hunker down and take a look at everything,” he said. “This council recognized that there were issues and jumped on it right away. In fact, everybody ran on that same back-to-basics fiscal responsibility platform and that is what this council has been doing.” In the last year, council has eliminated 30 positions from the city’s payroll. In addition, it has yet to resign about another 20 community centre staff, although negotiations with the union representing those workers is scheduled to begin this month.