Reams of detail in city budget serve to shut taxpayers out
Congratulations to the people who created this year's City of Ottawa budget. It's quite a feat to put together so many words and numbers and still tell the public so little about the city's priorities and how the $3.94 billion in proposed spending will meet them.
It's not that the budget is skimpy, far from it. It presents 78 pages of information on the community and protective services committee alone. No detail is too small to mention. Did you know it costs $22 to register a kitten, or that the neutering of male dogs is done on a sliding scale according to the weight of the dog?
The cost of booking city-owned rental rooms for events unlikely to be held in 2021 is up between 4.3 and 5.1 per cent. One can only imagine how much bureaucratic thinking went into determining the fine gradations of increase among the various rooms.
It is difficult to say how large the budget document is because there is no single document until the budget is approved. Instead, there is a brief overview and separate reports for each of the city's nine committees and half a dozen external boards. It's an approach that makes it difficult for the public to grasp the big picture.
Dive into any of these committee budget plans and you will find boilerplate descriptions of what various departments do and page after page of information that is of no use to all but a tiny fraction of the public. Wondering about the snow disposal fees for tandem, tri-axle, semi and combo dump trucks? Your questions are answered in the city budget. Musicians and artists take note, loading fees applicable to you are up $1, and if you lose the
Burying taxpayers in facts of little importance is a perverse kind of openness ...
permit it will cost $10.50 for a replacement, up 25 cents.
Burying taxpayers in facts of little importance is a perverse kind of openness and transparency, but what's missing is a coherent big picture. A budget should explain in plain language what the city's goals are, how much progress has been made toward those goals, and what additional result any new spending is expected to bring.
By those standards, the latest city budget falls well short. There is a lot of talk about investment, as the city prefers to call spending, but precious little about the expected returns.
Although city councillors have declared a climate emergency and a housing and homelessness emergency, the brief introduction to this budget says the city's “top priority” is “the health and safety of our residents.” Cited are things like long-term care, public health, social services and recreation programs.
The climate emergency does get a brief mention. The city will devote $2.6 million to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That's not even its top environmental spending plan. That would be $8.7 million to cap part of the Trail Waste Facility. The climate emergency draws even fewer dollars than enhancing corrosion control at the water plants.
The budget says “support for housing is needed more than ever” then goes on to promise an additional $15 million, the same increase as the last two years.
If you are concerned about the city's deteriorating roads, you will be comforted to know that the city will spend $45 million to resurface roads, up from an average of $35.5 million a year in the last term of council. You might wonder when this moderately accelerated pace will get Ottawa's roads up to its own standards. Not a fact that you will find in the budget.
Having told the public next to nothing, the city is now going through the charade of letting taxpayers respond at committees. The vast majority will not take up that invitation and the rubber stamp will pound down on this budget in early December. From the perspective of the people in charge at city hall, the system is working exactly the way they like it.