Lydia Thomas: 'place the final decision making in the hands of the public'

By Pepper Parr

June 12^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Lydia Thomas was one of two women who gave excellent delegations before Council this week.  The two delegations should be read at the same time – these women are talking about your taxes and your city.

Lydia Thomas was back before City Council talking about taxes.

This time she wanted council to think in terms of the process they used to determine what taxes were going to be.

In her delegation Thomas used the way Markham adopts their budget as ab example hoping that Burlington would at least take a look at what Markham was doing and consider a similar approach for Burlington.  Thomas didn’t suggest that people from Burlington pay the folks in Markham a visit and learn what they could.

Thomas made the point that she didn’t want to adopt the Markham budget but did want to adopt the principles of budgeting from Markham.   “Good principles of budgeting can be used no matter what city or corporation we are talking about regardless of the services provided” she said

The key thing to remember about Markham’s E3 process is that it involves every department and every single spend. These 4 pillars must be applied to all areas of Burlington City Hall – not just 1 or 2 spend cut targets.

My name is Lydia Thomas living in Aldershot Burlington.

During the 2024 budget process, there were many residents including myself who identified the need to stop property tax increases and accelerate cost cutting.

Despite the fact that more than 40 motions were brought forward and some were passed, the budget increase miraculously remained the same at 10.2%.  Some quotes from the mayor which I found discouraging were we can “use savings of $1M to fund new Full Time Employees  in IT department” and in another instance –  that is a good way to “save to help fund the transformation” project.

The end result was that the 10.2% increase remained the same despite the cost savings motions that were passed.   It was clear to me that there was absolutely no intent in trying to reduce resident’s property taxes despite the public outcry for prudence.

This tells me that we the public need to get involved earlier and more frequently.  And so, my Expectations of this council are much higher but very attainable.

For 24 years The City of Markham has received the Distinguished Budget Award and received an A- rating from the CD Howe Report for their Budget fundamentals.     In comparison Burlington has received none of these awards and although not rated in the CD Howe Report, Burlington would be comparable to Hamilton’s F rating or at best Oakville’s D- rating.

Markham has a history of low property tax increases with an average of 2.17% increase over 20 years.  Burlington’s is almost double that at  4.28%.   PAUSE

Markham’ highest tax increase in 20 years was 3.98%.  They also had 4 years of zero % increases.

So YES,  it can  be done.

Burlington City council has approved tax increases of 15.5% in 2023 and 10.2% in 2024.

Markham’s  3 year compounded tax increase has been 7.8% while  Burlington’s was 32%!  That is more than 4x that of Markham!

71% of Burlington’s revenue comes from Property taxes while the average Canadian municipality is 48%.  Burlington is overly reliant on property taxes to fund initiatives and so we are overtaxed.

So what is the secret to Markham’s success in hitting 0% property tax increases?  –

Markham devotes an abundance of time and energy towards cost cutting and revenue generation otherwise know as an E3 program Excellence in Effectiveness and Efficiency.    As you can see on this slide, their hard work represents $35.8 Million in savings since 2009 and represents 28% tax avoidance for Markham residents.

Burlington’s 2024 budget savings were 0.2% while Markham’s was 2% in each of the first 2 years of the E3 program.

Here we see that  although Burlington and Markham have the same size budget of around $434M , Markham is serving a population that is 71% LARGER   !!!!     with an operating budget  that is 20% SMALLER !!!   It is clear that cost savings are available in Burlington.

I am proposing that through the leadership of our Council that we create a Burlington Excellence through Efficiency and Effectiveness (E3)  task force that works with Markham to implement their program in Burlington.     The goal would be 1.5%  or $6.5M in spend cuts and revenue generation and would be directly allocated – NOT towards new spend projects but towards reducing property taxes to 0%.

Zero % is possible if we learn from Markham.

This E3 goal of $6.5 M towards 0% property tax increases will be the most important budget ask from the community.  It will be how we measure this Council’s success.

Last year the online survey clearly stated that 57% of respondents wanted services cut to maintain or reduce taxes.  And yet you did the opposite – you increased property taxes to enhance services.   Cut spending to reduce taxes was far and away the #1 request over and above density, transportation or any other important theme.

If I look at Burlington’s 2024 budget document, cost cutting is not easy to find.  I had to dig for the numbers in the appendix.   Markham on the other hand has it stated as a priority and mandate within the first 15 pages of their budget.  Cost cutting needs to be more of a focus and will require some tough decisions but if Markham can do it so can we -let’s learn from them.

In order to hit our E3 goal of 1.5%, we can focus on 4 key areas:

The first area is process improvements.

Process Improvements – the key here is that a Task Force called the “Make it Happen” task force should be created to drive the E3 process and provide progress reports back to council and the public.   One key area to focus on is process mapping to reduce redundancies and cut workload.

Technology -The City of Burlington has spent millions of dollars in technological investment which should translate to time savings and efficiencies to redeploy head count.   And yet, we have increased headcount at an alarming rate with 111 hires in the last year and 57 more planned.   This should be another Focus of the Make it happen Taskforce- working with the software selling company’s team to accelerate efficiencies and drive costs down.

Increase Revenues – service user fees, by law enforcement, business tax collection, library fees, parking fees, timing of fee payment and investment funds have revenue increase potential.  There are many revenue opportunities but the key thing is to do it without increasing head count.

Centers of Excellence-  the 3 previous slides should lead you to re-examine org structures, reduce reporting levels,  redeploy resources, retraining and succession planning all for cost savings.

The last and most important thing I want to talk about is lock step community engagement through this process including all budget related decisions all year.   Getting us involved in September clearly did not work last year.

We have a charter of Public Engagement that clearly agrees to: and I quote: (1)“ partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives …” (2) “ place the final decision-making in the hands of the public” (3) “we will implement what you decide”

Since November when I brought up the point that these values were missing from the 2024 budget process, all of a sudden I see that you are talking about changing the charter with discussions in September.   The charter is just fine the way it is.    You only need to walk the talk and live up to the promises you made when you created it.

The public deserves to be lock step involved in every aspect leading up to the budget.  Specifically, we would like the Budget to be a standing agenda item at all Community of the whole and Council meetings.

We would like biweekly progress reports from the “Make it Happen” task force and the right to comment as department budget proposals are being submitted and not as they are approved.     We want to be engaged every step of the way January to December as per the charter of public engagement.

So to summarize, the ask is to adopt Markham’s E3 Model with a 1.5% goal.

-Walk the Talk with  the Charter of Community Engagement- don’t change it, execute it exactly as you promised and as I suggested

-Adopt Markham’s budget format and transparency of language particularly in the first 15 pages

-Commit to ZERO % tax increase- 32% in the last 3 years should be enough

And lastly

-Increase the property tax subsidy from 600 households which is negligible to 5000

There was a brisk back and forth discussion with Council after the delegations.  Both Doreen Sebeen and Lydia Thomas were saying much the same thing – change the way you are doing things and improve on the way you engage the public.

Because both women, who knew each other when they attended high school in Stony Creek, had important things to say, we will do a wrap up of the comments that took place between each of the women and City council in a separate article.