When sa国际传媒鈥檚 municipal auditor general was fired last year, the main complaint was failure to deliver. Specifically, Basia Ruta had promised to conduct 18 audits in the year following her appointment.
In reality, she completed only one during that period, and just three in total before she was dumped. (There were other alleged issues, including poor staff morale.)
So how has the new appointee, Gordon Ruth, performed? By one measure, considerably better. Since he took over last September, his office has completed 11 audits and announced the start of two more.
Yet a serious question remains. The audits delivered so far have focused on individual municipalities, and indeed on just one service area within those municipalities.
Thus there are reports on Cranbrook鈥檚 asset management, Surrey鈥檚 procurement practices, policing agreements in Port Alberni and so on.
But there are 162 local governments in sa国际传媒, each with at least 10 cost centres. If the auditor continues this piecemeal approach, it will take more than a century to finish the task.
What we need is a broader examination of the municipal sector as a whole, not a fragmentary attack on hundreds of targets, one at a time.
The auditor, to be fair, has partially recognized this. The two uncompleted studies announced this year examine system-wide requirements 鈥� clean drinking water and human-resource management.
These are difficulties that most local governments face, and it is on such recurring themes that the auditor should concentrate.
Four challenges in particular have dogged municipalities 鈥� financial planning, compensation policies, project management and creation of shared services. The capital region has repeatedly encountered problems in all of these areas, and none has been satisfactorily resolved.
Saanich council, for example, recently complained that last year councillors found themselves scrambling for budget cuts to avoid a large tax increase. Staff were asked to come up with options in only a few weeks.
That should never happen. The annual budget cycle should require managers to identify possible savings as part of an embedded process. Bureaucracies have a natural tendency to grow; if they鈥檙e not checked by a rigorous search for economies, the result is an ever-expanding tax bill.
The lack of discipline in compensation policies is likewise an obvious target. A recent study by Ernst & Young showed that between 2001 and 2012, municipalities granted salary increases twice as high as the provincial government, and 65 per cent ahead of inflation.
The problems associated with project planning in Victoria speak for themselves. Cost overruns and missed completion dates have plagued the Johnson Street Bridge project. Infighting between competing viewpoints, and lack of shared priorities, have likewise delayed the wastewater system rebuild, with significant cost implications for taxpayers.
Lastly, there is the massive waste involved in running duplicate administrations. Greater Victoria might or might not need 13 municipal councils, but we certainly do not need 13 payroll, human-resource and accounting departments. These could easily be consolidated.
Here is where the auditor should concentrate his efforts. These problems aren鈥檛 confined to the capital region. They occur provincewide, and they exist for a reason, namely, that powerful interests are involved.
Of course, managers don鈥檛 want their budgets cut. Neither are they interested in seeing their jobs disappear in a merger. Naturally, unions such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees will exploit the weakness of smaller municipalities to drive through hefty wage hikes.
It would greatly strengthen the hand of local governments in resisting such pressures if they had authoritative guidance to fall back on.
This is what Ruth and his team were appointed to do. Define best practices in meeting the most pressing challenges, then call out municipalities that fail to perform.
