Bridgetown and Canso: Tale of two small towns
BRIDGETOWN and Canso seem to be emerging from their financial troubles on very different trajectories.
Bridgetown is headed back to elected self-government this fall, though with a smaller council. Canso is giving up town status and merging with the District of Guysborough.
The mood in Bridgetown is brighter than a year ago, when discovery of a massive fraud prompted the mayor and council to resign and seek provincial help.
Since then, the team appointed to run the town has straightened out the books and created a plan to manage the debt and fraud losses.
The community is preparing to run its own affairs again after fall elections. New faces are offering for council. Recent arrivals, bringing children and their own jobs, are a hint of renewal and optimism that the town has much to offer the right young families.
In Canso, things were less upbeat at a ceremony Sunday marking its incorporation into the District of Guysborough. Residents supported the merger as the only practical response to the town’s loss of fishery jobs, tax base and people. But some find it hard to look past the loss of independence and to see the merger as a basis for lowering costs and reviving the community.
In fact, Bridgetown and Canso face similar problems, shared by other small municipalities with shrinking populations, fragile finances and orders from higher levels of government to upgrade costly services.
Meeting new federal and provincial water and sewer standards boosted the debt and tax rates in Bridgetown and Canso. It’s the same for other small units. Mandated standards require investments greater than anything in their past and beyond their capacity to manage today.
Whether municipalities merge or stay nominally independent, financial reality is pushing them to the same place.
Either way, they will have to pool their resources and share the provision of services through common organizations, so their taxpayers can afford them.
Combining water utilities is an obvious start. But waste management, police and fire, planning and back-office functions like billing would be more efficient on a larger scale.
The Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities has a Towns Task Force looking into moving this co-operation forward (See Marilla Stephenson’s column today). But we really need municipalities to get serious about service pooling before another adverse event pushes another one of them over the financial edge.
The Canso and Bridgetown crises offer some useful lessons. Canso and Guysborough amicably negotiated their merger with the considerable help of provincial transition funding. Bridgetown benefited from a provincial audit and the expertise and leadership provided by a strong team of retired public servants.
The province should be using such incentives proactively, to get municipalities to adopt sensible service pooling before more crises blow up.
In the end, municipal status is not remotely as important as a community’s viability and ability to attract residents. In fact, sticking with an uneconomic governance model will weaken a community in these crucial areas.
Hopefully, Canso can stop being consumed by efforts to remain a town and focus on being a viable, attractive, affordable community that sensibly pools service costs. Like Bridgetown, its great asset is the community itself, lovingly created over many generations, and attractive to the right young entrepreneurial families. Who don’t care about town status.
Not much hope
Submitted by traispealot on June 13, 2012 - 8:07am.
The economic engine that propels Nova Scotia is sputtering badly and has been for years. Factor in over-regulation, through-the-roof power prices, pot-hole ridden roads and the highest tax regime in Canada and it's not hard to see why the job creators have thrown up their hands in the small communities and have left. The simple fact that there are no jobs means that rural Nova Scotians have little choice but to pull up and move while they can still afford to take their stuff with them. Now, with Harper poised to switch UI back to being an insurance scheme rather than a welfare scheme, the depopulation of rural Nova Scotia is only going to accelerate. There’re lots that could be done to stem the tide, but the NDP is not the government to do it. The minimum wage law in the rural areas could be repealed for one thing. A job at seven bucks an hour pays considerably more than no job at ten. Probably not going to happen though.
Please Turn Out The Lights
Submitted by daveburris on June 13, 2012 - 11:41am.
The only thing one could possibly add to the 1st comment, by traispealot, would be about meeting those new federal and provincial water and sewer standards.
Since the former standards seemed to work just fine, that is, we had no death or disease, then I submit that these new standards are just expensive, nanny-state over-reaction.
But regarding the EI changes, my guess is they won't change much, just tinkering at the edges.
And we still have the NIMBY problem, to-day they want to shut down mink farming.
Last one leaving turn out the lights.
Over regulated
Submitted by Here on June 13, 2012 - 12:40pm.
Communities form to share services as it is more economical and sensible. Complex solutions to problems never work. The simpler you can keep things the better. Unfortunately we have a never ending supply of people willing to tell us what to do, how to do it, and what is best for us.
Government over regulation is doing the same thing to small towns that they did to reserves. With government it always becomes about the process, not about the people.
Was there not some recent press...
Submitted by city mouse on June 13, 2012 - 12:52pm.
...about NS having a relatively larger percent of it’s population remaining in rural areas? Why no mention of this? Why is this national trend not mentioned as a factor? Maybe the results of shifting 21st century demographics (and for good or bad, the resistance by Nova Scotians) account for more of this issue than power rates, Harperism, Dippers, EI changes, sewers and NIMBYs.
Opportunity for Sharing of Key Services?
Submitted by RaiseTheBar on June 14, 2012 - 7:16am.
“Nova Scotia has 55 municipalities: 3 regional municipalities, 21 rural municipalities and 31 towns. There are 22 incorporated villages, that are part of the rural municipalities and not municipalities themselves.”(www.gov.ns.ca/snsmr/muns/contact/)
In a population of 946,000 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ig-gi/pop-ns-eng.htm), that works out to one municipal structure for every 17,200 people on average. If you take out just HRM (390,000), that means each of the remaining 54 municipalities represent, on average, just under 10,300 people.
So the real question here is why we believe we need separate councils, by-laws, administrative structures/systems/processes for every 10,000 citizens. Beyond the efficiency opportunity of sharing an administrative services and technical expertise, there is enormous opportunity to improve the safety and security of smaller communities by sharing in a smaller number of well-developed, resourced and professional services…or else risk another Bridgetown - or worse, Walkerton, Ontario - because a small community couldn’t afford the expertise, oversight and/or resources to ensure safe and secure municipal services.
There may yet be opportunities for Municipal Affairs, larger Municipalities, or a unique not-for-profit enterprise to develop a “back-end” solution to smaller municipalities to allow them to remain independent, while getting high quality services for their citizens. (And there are likely good examples of this today).
All that said, municipal amalgamation will and should continue, given the unsustainably and impracticality of 55 structures for such small populations.