More amalgamation anyone?
Outgoing Mapleton Mayor Bruce Whale raised an interesting idea during his final meeting in the chair.
As he made his parting remarks, including reflections on the past term of office and brief tributes to members of the outgoing council, Whale also offered some jarring thoughts on the future of municipal government.
While it must seem to some as if the dust has barely settled from the last round of amalgamations, Whale actually suggested further municipal mergers might be not only possible, but positive.
“We may have to look at further amalgamation to make some of these small communities more manageable,” said Whale at the Nov. 25 meeting. “A municipality of 10,000 people isn’t really that big,” he added, noting municipalities 10 times the size of Mapleton are common in the province. “The question is how do we put that together so it’s effective, so that there is still local input, but we get some of those efficiencies of a bigger municipality?”
Good questions indeed – and the answer is probably that we won’t.
We doubt there’s much appetite for more official mergers among today’s municipal leaders. While many repeat, if asked, the mantra that municipalities (hence taxpayers) could never have dealt with the downloading the province inflicted upon them over a decade ago without today’s larger assessment bases, one senses few want it to go any further. The additional loss of communal identity and distancing of government from the people that would result from making rural municipalities even larger is not something many seem prepared to champion.
Still, it’s not as if municipalities are having an easy time of it financially and most continue to decry the ever-diminishing supply of unconditional provincial grant money as they struggle to maintain vital infrastructure.
So what is the answer? Perhaps Whale addressed it earlier in his talk, when he suggested an increased emphasis on service sharing.
“What sort of services can we do by joining with other municipalities, or the county, or even private industry?” Whale wondered. He has a point here and some useful co-operation may eventually flow out of some wider-focused activity such as the joint economic development efforts underway among northern Wellington municipalities.
Interestingly, just before the Mike Harris Conservatives came into power in the ‘90s and coerced municipalities into their current configuration, “sharing services” was a common theme at council meetings around Ontario. Under the previous government, NDP premier Bob Rae’s much-maligned group, municipalities had begun to get the word that provincial largesse would not last forever and they had started to discuss ways they could logically work together to eliminate duplication and save money. Of course that talk all ended when Harris entered the picture and threatened municipalities with restructuring commissions should they fail to get together on their own.
If talk of service sharing is surfacing again, hopefully this time we will let things ride a little further down that road before we even dream of descending once again into the counter-productive chaos of wide-spread amalgamation.
