After the auditor general for local government was fired five months ago, Premier Christy Clark said: 鈥淎ll the options are on the table.鈥� Those options were understood to include eliminating the office entirely.
Since then, however, the minister responsible, Coralee Oakes, has backtracked. She now says she wants to work with the Union of sa国际传媒 Municipalities to rebuild the office.
On balance, this is the wrong solution. There are lessons to be learned from the failures to date.
When the office was launched in 2013, the new auditor general, Basia Ruta, promised to complete 18 audits in the first year. She managed just three in two years. This in itself is illuminating.
There are nearly 200 local governments in sa国际传媒 At that rate of progress, it will take 130 years to audit them all.
But the reports she did publish are more illuminating still. They range from the obvious to the impractical, with little of value in between.
Two of the local governments audited were the town of Rossland and the district of Delta. The Delta audit was a compilation of everything the district was doing right.
The Rossland audit was a list of everything Ruta and her staff thought the town was doing wrong.
But that is exactly the problem with this scheme. The population of Rossland is 3,500. The population of Delta is 100,000. The management systems Delta can afford are far beyond the reach of Rossland and other small towns.
This is neither to cheapen Delta鈥檚 accomplishments 鈥� the district is obviously doing a first-class job 鈥� nor to exonerate Rossland entirely. But with such enormous disparities between the very large and the very small, to lay down one set of principles for everyone is nearly impossible.
It makes sense, for example, to expect large cities to install sophisticated contract-tendering systems. But there is no point in a village council seeking multiple bids on a roofing contract when there is only one roofing firm in town.
This is no mere road bump. It is a fatal objection to provincewide audits, because across sa国际传媒, there are nearly infinite variations on this theme.
There is an important distinction to draw here. Keeping an eye on financial statements is another matter entirely. We need to know that municipalities are maintaining their books in an honest and reliable manner, but every local government is already audited each year by an independent firm.
So if hiring a replacement for Ruta is of dubious value, what should be done?
First, the issue of salary differentials demands attention. A recent study by Ernst & Young found no coherent compensation policy among municipalities. Local government staff were also paid more, for jobs of equal value, than provincial employees.
Yet the salary bill for municipal governments, provincewide, is around $1.75 billion. A 10 per cent reduction would save $175 million.
Is that achievable? The Ernst & Young report found that between 2001 and 2012, municipal employees received a salary lift 15 per cent above inflation. Some modification seems fair.
This is one area where benchmarks, adjusted for the size of each district, can work. But it won鈥檛 happen voluntarily. The provincial government would have to step in.
No doubt the premier would rather avoid that. Who needs the wrath of 200 mayors? But if she鈥檚 serious, a coherent salary grid is the place to start.
Second, the province should sit down with the UBCM and lay out management guidelines for small, medium and large councils. Offer each grouping a series of targets that would help them get value for money.
That would avoid the endless slog of auditing 200 municipalities, while giving everyone a fair basis for comparing performance.
