Do you know how your community measures up?
The Ontario government requires that major municipalities measure the cost effectiveness and efficiency of their pubic services every year and publicly release that information to taxpayers.
The Municipal Performance Measurement Program is almost 10 years old. Municipalities will have to file their next report after Jan. 1, 2010.
The province requires more than 50 measures, grouped under some 12 areas, including:
- Local government
- Fire
- Police
- Roads
- Transit
- Libraries
- Drinking water
- And garbage and recycling
Since these reports have been filed for a number of years, you can check if costs or spending is going up, down or sideways.
If you check the police statistics, it cost Brantford $269 per person to provide services in 2008, up almost $18. Yet the total crime rate per 1,000 persons fell to 94 incidents, compared to 104 the year before.
Other stats: treating drinking water cost $383 per megalitre (whatever that is); operating city parks $63 per person; running recreation facilities and programs totalled $100 per person; and running libraries $44 per person.
Then there’s all kinds of stats regarding garbage and recycling. Collecting and disposing of garbage cost $141 a tonne, while collecting recycling was more, at $147 per tonne. In all, 29.6% of residential waste was diverted for recycling, but that was down almost two per cent from 2007. That’s nothing to be proud of.
Brantford’s report, listed online under the finance department’s documents, contains notes explaining some of the numbers. But you can draw some of your own conclusions.
For example, some people might think it unfair that the library system only gets $44 per person, while arenas, pools and fitness programs get $100. In fact, it costs more to keep city parks pretty than to run the city’s two libraries.
And you would think that it would be troubling that the amount of residential waste recycled is stuck around 30% over a five-year period. Shouldn’t the percentage of recycled material be going up? What needs to be done to get over that 30% hump?
The province issues a report summarizing all these numbers, which is available online. Unfortunately, it doesn’t name the municipalities, so you can’t compare Brantford directly to a similar-sized city such as Cambridge. There are comparisons by group size based on population and northern and southern communities are separated, but you can’t do city by city comparisons. That would give people a better sense of how their city ranks.
Even still, there’s a lot of information that curious residents might find interesting. Informed residents should have a sense of where their money goes.
