Pie Palace

Blogawa is now up to five feeds. I added Mike Powell Fan Club earlier today (and discovered that I don’t handle podcasting).

I also discovered that <div/> tags don’t seem to be legal HTML 4. Instead of being an empty div, both FireFox and IE6 treat them as an open div. Blogawa’s HTML scrubber now removes them, but it took an agonizing hour and a half to discover that syntactically correct HTML is actually semantically incorrect.

I bumped into Blake Baston’s blog yesterday. As a previous candidate four council, he’s doing a good job of following the city budget. One post particularly focused my growing resentment of the options we’re being presented with in the current budget mess. Here’s my comment (I’ve reorganized it for salience):

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Ottawa has been punished by short term thinking. Last year the city robbed its financial reserves so that Larry O’Brien could say that they did everything possible to prevent a tax increase. Now we’re talking about selling of assets so that we can delay the inevitable tax increases. It’s ridiculous. Council has to bite the bullet: taxes will rise (preferably at the rate of inflation), and the cost of services can’t outstrip income.

Now that’s out of the way, here are my comments on Blake’s post.

First, we stop adding new programs and demands on the city budget. I know the green box program is desired. I’m less convinced about the idling bylaw.

The “new programs and demands” on the city budget are often maintenance concerns or programs that will end up saving the city money in the long run. The green box program is a good example of that. Currently, the city has to pay for garbage removal, and it has to find new dumps every few years. With a composting program, the city will be diverting waste away from the landfill (lessening the long-term need to find new dumps), and it will be recovering some of the costs of garbage removal by selling off the compost.

Second… What if we asked every department with staff of more than ten employees to do with one less headcount but only do so if someone leaves or retires? How much would that hurt any given department?

Reducing the number of employees doesn’t reduce the amount of work that needs to get done. This looks like a recipe for a poorer quality of service, and more overtime claims by city employees. If council wants to reduce the number of city employees, it should do it honestly: by cutting the amount of work the employees need to do.

Third, looking into selling profitable non-core services that the city provides is not a bad idea. If they are profitable, then the city will get a premium on their sale. Also, the net benefit to the city could be more than the current profit. By cutting back on office space for outsourced services all help chip away at the deficit.

That’s a terrible idea. When services are sold, the city loses a long-term source of income for a one-time cash infusion. That isn’t sustainable. If a service/corporation isn’t as profitable as it should be (such as Hydro Ottawa), then the city should look at ways of making it profitable. Even outsourcing is preferable.

It’s a bad sign that I’m getting my local news from the blogotubes, but I couldn’t resist posting a link to a bit of investigative journalism done by the folks at Miss Vicky’s Offhand Remarks.

In a nutshell: the city (at Larry O’Brien’s bidding) paid a consultant $80,000 to help develop the city budget. Part of that budget mentioned outsourcing parking meter management as a cost-saving measure, pointing to the success of Hamilton’s parking meter outsourcing. Miss Vicky and the Webgeek did some Googling, and discovered that:

• Hamilton handles its own parking meters, thank you very much
  
• Dundas, which recently amalgamated with Hamilton, did contract out their parking meter management, but now wants to reincorporate the service back into their city. The goal is to increase profit being seen in the old municipality of Dundas.

The comments contain an interesting back-and-forth between Blake Batson and the purveyors of Miss Vicky’s on whether outsourcing of a profitable really service is a good idea. Reasons to outsource: a private company has a stronger profit motive than government, so it should be able to be more efficient (ie, a greater return without charging the public more). Reasons not to oursource: the tender process is expensive, and the city will eventually realize that it can be as profitable as the private company and it will reintegrate the service anyway.

Of course, when you factor in that we’re dealing with a finite amount of profit, the silent costs of outsourcing add up: paying off employees who are let go, legal fees for tender and reacquisition, costs of studies to ensure that the private organization is doing a decent job, cost of interacting with the outsourcing firm, et cetera. The devil is in the details.

My pet project, Blogawa.ca now produces RSS of the contributor’s feeds. Huzzah! Next project: Make Blogawa track/republish events in Ottawa.

So CBC doesn’t have the spine to stand up to the Chinese government by airing an unedited documentary on the Falun Gong. But the do have the guts to report on their own editorial lapse (then again, the story is just an AP wire story, so maybe their feed-reader published it without human intervention).

Now they say they’re airing a modified version of the documentary. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison of the before and after.

I took a couple of hours to hack Rob Sargent’s RS Event Wordpress plugin to contain two extra fields: location and original URL. The idea is to provide a microformat generator that will produce machine-readable event listings for Blogawa.ca. If you’re interested in trying the plugin out, see the project page. The sad part is that I really do have better things to be doing with my time.

Pascal Meunier has written an essay about loyalty in software. It’s a riff on the idea of trusted computing (and the resulting crippled software), which asks about software’s loyalty. Is the software loyal to its user (as it should be for personal use), or is it loyal to its producer/distributer? The brief discussion of loyalty in free software interesting. It would be interesting if loyalty could be quantified or expressed somehow. I’d like to be able to tag stuff that I write with a loyalty signature. Update: Thanks to dave0 for pointing out that I’d failed to include a link. Now I do.