Pie Palace

I have a fair amount of free time, and I’m vaguely interested in what happens in my city, so a CBC report on a community group’s recommendations for the city’s budget caught my eye. The community group is called the “Community Budget Advisory Team“. The CBC story made CBAT sound like a bunch of neocons on a picnic, so I asked the All Seeing Eye of Google to direct me to the CBAT website, and the report.

The CBC’s analysis wasn’t wrong, per se, but it certainly didn’t stick with the spirit of the report. In my brief skimming, it appears to be a relatively standard “users should have to pay” rant, but with a fair number of good ideas included. First, I’ll diff what CBC said against the report:

It wants the city to consider user fees at libraries, and consider shutting some branches – Not quite.
The suggested plan concentrates on redistribution, based on forecasted growth and transit growth over the next 10 years. In addition, CBAT does advocate improved reporting of library costs, and asking the province to change the library laws to allow fees to charging user fees. The user fees thing doesn’t sound like such a good idea, IMHO.

It’s calling for a reduction in transit spending, or higher fares, and a hold on new bus purchases – True, to a point.
CBAT suggests fare increases in tune with cost increases over the next five years, or a reduction in costs. Interestingly, it also advocates adding more concessions to OC Transpo bus terminals. This seems like a remarkably good idea: lots of people spend lots of time at bus terminals. Extending the concessions to include more corner-store-like services would certainly be helpful, and probably turn a healthy profit for the bus company.

The 68 page report contains a number of good ideas that are ignored in CBC’s report:

• Make IT pay it’s way: spending and purchases that are supposed to provide a cost-savings should demonstrate a cost-savings; while considering outsourcing IT entirely. (page 19)
• Reduce overtime. Or at least report it as a separate item on budget documents. (page 16)
• $23m of budget spending is on new busses for OC Transpo that are apparently unnecessary. This constitutes half of the $40m that CBAT could purportedly save (according to the CBC). This is probably worth following up. Are those busses necessary? By whose numbers? Could their acquisition be delayed with little or no extra cost?
• The city’s budget makes little or no reference to the Ottawa 20/20 document.

CBAT has produced an interesting document that contains some good ideas. The CBC report makes it sound like CBAT is suggesting some kind of hack-n-slash hatchet job, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead of covering the nuances of what CBAT suggested, and some of the good ideas, the CBC reporter decided to paint CBAT as a bunch of terrifying money-grubbers.