By Pepper Parr
BURLINTON, ON March 9, 2011 – He was looking very ‘corporate’. Hair tightly combed with the parting clearly visible as opposed to the tousled boyish look he normally wears. The double breasted jacket and the sedate tie – they were all part of the look Ward 5 Council member Paul Sharman brought to the room as he actually banged the gavel to call the Budget and Corporate Services Committee to order so they could look at the finer detail in the 2011 Capital spending budget they were going to approve at the Committee level.
Ward 6 council member and chair of the Budget and Corporate Services Committee went for his corporate look as he herded the cats through a complex process. Some of the reddish hair did turn gray during the meeting.
While there were a number of other items on the Agenda, the Staff report on the Shape Burlington report along with the comments from Shaping Burlington being one of them – this story is about how your Council and city staff spend your dollars on capital items.
Staff works from a document that has items in place for the next 20 years. They can tell you how much they propose to spend on the Master signage strategy ($108,000 each year for three years and then $150,000); King Road reconstruction ($2,051,000 – but $2,019,000 of that is sitting in a reserve fund); lunch room for the bus drivers at the Burlington GO station ($45,000. in 2011) and all kinds of discussion about locating the transfer terminal on John Street.
Whenever there is a technical question or a need for more detail the staff person trots to the podium and reads numbers from the clutch of papers they have in their hands. They seldom get tripped up. Name a street or a park and someone will tell you what has been spent, what has to be spent and when and how much. It’s pretty impressive.
The council members are given this thick binder with all the numbers and are asked to go though it line by line (so if you’ve called your council member and not had the call returned – this is why). These boys and girls have been doing their homework.
Acting General Manager Finance Joan Ford explained in a previous committee meeting that any council member can question any item on the budget – all they has to do was fill in a form – which they did – and that resulted in a document with 87 items the council members wanted to comment on.
In the past Ward 4 council member Jack Dennison was by far the most prolific when it came to asking questions but this year Ward 1 council member Marianne Meed Ward may have set a new record and blown the Dennison numbers out of the water.
Of the 87 changes that the seven members of Council requested 52 of them came from Meed Ward. Ward 6 council member Blair Lancaster didn’t have a single request for a change.
Staff handled all of the requests and later this week we should have a number as to what the Capital portion of the budget was going to amount to this year. Jack Dennison was keen to whittle at least a million out of what had been put forward by staff.
When you sit in committee meetings and try to absorb all the data one thing becomes evident. The prep work done by staff and their capacity to answer the questions is pretty impressive.
What also becomes clear is that the city has reserve funds all over the place; 37 of the things tat cover everything you can imagine, and if you’re not sure whch reserve fund to stuff the dollars into, there is a Reserve fund called – Other, can you believe that? Better than tucking it under the mattress I suppose. Good, frugal financial management for sure – but do we need quite that much tucked away in reserves and surpluses. Might be an opportunity to take a little less from each taxpayer this time around.
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