Town of Yarmouth shares asset management successes

Back in 2004, council ‘saw the writing on the wall,’ needed to take action, workshop participants told

It was the need for infrastructure that led to the creation of the Town of Yarmouth in 1890 and infrastructure remains at the core of what the town is about, municipal government officials were told during a gathering in Yarmouth.

Jeff Gushue, the Town of Yarmouth’s CAO, was one of the speakers for a session on “asset management success stories.” It was part of the spring workshop put on by the newly christened Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, previously known as the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities.

The success story, in the Town of Yarmouth’s case, is how it funds its asset depreciation from current revenue, a practice that dates back to the middle of the last decade or so, although in his presentation Gushue went much farther back – back to when the town was established – saying infrastructure was what brought the town into being in the first place.

“The town wasn’t formed because people living here felt that they needed more land-use planning,” he said, “and it wasn’t about recreation. It was about the infrastructure, so it is job one. It’s the most important thing that we do.”

Back in the late nineteenth century, he said, the main issue more specifically was water infrastructure.

Fast-forward more than 100 years, to 2004, and the town’s budget was “very tight,” Gushue said.

“We had no money in current revenue going into capital,” he said. “We’d take money out of reserves to invest in our infrastructure, and that is not a sustainable approach.”

The town council of the day had a couple of options and it decided to go with major tax hikes, increasing both the commercial and residential rates by 25 cents.

“I don’t know if anybody else in the room has done a 25-cent tax increase, but it was quite a shock,” Gushue said, “but we were on the very low end of tax rates (for) towns, and so we moved ourselves essentially to the middle – or upper middle perhaps. That allowed us to fund our depreciation.”

While raising taxes so significantly was a difficult thing for council to do, Gushue said, “they saw the writing on the wall, they knew what they had to do and they had the wisdom and the guts to do it.”

As for the present-day council, he said, “They are required to make choices every year and we the staff certainly respect these decisions they have to make in order to keep this practice in place.”