Here’s a planning suggestion for B.C.’s 2022 municipal government graduating class: Do the math.
Do it for the planning discipline it requires and for the fiscal accountability it maps out for your administration and for the voters who took the time to cast ballots to elect you.
A cautionary tale of not doing the municipal math is being played out in the City of Surrey, where a decision to replace the RCMP with a municipal police force instituted under outgoing mayor Doug McCallum’s council appears to be headed back to the RCMP under mayor-elect Brenda Locke. This, even though the seismic shift to a Surrey municipal police force could be past the point of no return – or at least past the point of any return on the massive investment of public money it will require.
And therein lies the math problem for City of Surrey residents. They and likely a lot of other British Columbians, innocent bystanders set to be collateral damage in the Surrey public safety soap opera, are the ones who will be footing the bill.
Establishing a municipal police force has many upsides in local accountability, local employment and community familiarity for police force members.
But doing the math under the bright light of public transparency would have helped Surrey’s council and community determine whether those upsides made financial and community sense for the city before the initial municipal police force commitment was made.
That basic arithmetic and fiscal transparency equation should be applied to all major planning decisions in all B.C. municipalities.
Absent that application, bad decisions will fill the void.
The country’s citizenry cannot afford to keep footing the bill for those bad decisions. COVID-19, inflation, geopolitical posturing and aggression, supply chain dysfunction and complacency have eliminated any margins of error that local, regional and national economies might have had at the outset of the 21st century.
If you need confirmation of that, just do the math.
