A more open budget process
Full Heart, Empty Arms by Heather MacArthurThe municipal budget officially adopted by Council Monday night doesn’t contain a whole lot of surprises (see our story on page 3), either for what it spends money on or for the bottom line: a small tax increase for most Uxbridge residents.
We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks, particularly about the immediate future of the Kennedy House property, but for now, we have two principal criticisms about the budget process, ones that have surfaced after four years of watching the development of the final document. One is a situation which the municipality can’t currently do much about - the lack of flexibility over which public works projects can or can’t be funded by development charges. In 2008, this resulted in the paving of Ball Road, a thoroughfare on which few people live, and even fewer requested that their road be paved. That cost half a million dollars, which could have been so much better spent somewhere else.
This year, even more money - over $800,000 - is being spent on re-paving the Seventh Concession (Main Street) between Wagg Road and Highway 21. At least Ball Road was a gravel road being paved - that’s some sort of visible improvement - but this two-kilometre stretch is already paved. We highly doubt that Council got a lot of complaints about its condition, so why Concession 7? In fact, the list of possible projects on which development charges can be spent is very short, and Council made the best of a bad scenario. Money for municipal improvements is already precious enough, it seems ridiculous, almost criminal, to waste almost a million dollars on a project that should be way, way down on the priority list.
It’s time that municipalities were given much more discretion on where to spend these funds, and the municipal associations which we pay large sums to belong to should be making those arguments on our behalf, before too many more budget years go by. Our other criticism is of the process, and is a matter over which Uxbridge Council has much more control.
If memory serves us correctly, a great number of the candidates in the last municipal election, including several who got themselves elected, had as a principal plank in their platforms the notion of regularly consulting their constituents through town hall meetings. It seemed like a pretty good idea. That’s why we have ward councillors, after all, rather than just electing five councillors at large, so that councillors can represent the interests of a smaller proportion of the Township population.
To represent those interests accurately and consistently, however, some sort of regular formal channel of communication needs to exist, like a town hall meeting that is scheduled long in
advance and occurs perhaps every three months or so. Such meetings, we suggest, would be very valuable in the budget process, a means of bouncing ideas and priorities off the people who will be directly affected. Since the current council was elected more than two years ago, we are aware of very few such meetings, and none during the budget process. But the whole budget process is public, we hear Town Hall saying, all meetings are open and advertised.
Perhaps, but how many are scheduled at a time when more than a select few of us can attend? Council needs to look at more ways of involving the public in the budget process, and town hall meetings hosted by ward councillors seem a positive step. The bottom line is too important to leave the public out.
