Reader Takes Mayor to Task Over Misinformation

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

In a recent message published in your paper the mayor wrote that she was concerned about certain misinformation that apparently had surfaced concerning the upcoming Service Delivery Review. As another informed reader has so correctly pointed out to you and your readers, the information concerning Grey Highlands was very misleading but she is further confused and explicitly wrong about the BMA references.

In her message the mayor has decided to use some information from the annual 2015 BMA Survey. For people that have never heard of this – the survey is prepared by the BMA Consulting Group from Hamilton, Ontario. They use annual data received from participating municipalities of which Meaford is a member. They have been doing these studies for 15 years. They provide comparisons for a number of department costs in each participating municipality per-capita and taxes to family income amongst other comparisons and rank the results for each participant.

In the budget debate last December I asked some council members through e-mail to review Meaford’s poor results from the 2014 survey before they passed the 2016 budget. Meaford’s results in the 2014 survey indicated that we were a high cost and a high tax municipality with the second-highest tax burden as a percentage of family income out of 93 participants. The clerk at the time recorded my question in the budget questions and answer section but I never heard from any councillor. The council basically ignored this third party comparator report on the basis it is difficult to compare “apples to apples” when dealing with other municipalities. In other words they thought the analysis prepared by BMA was not applicable to Meaford’s operations or budget and they disregarded it.

Surprisingly the mayor is now quoting from the 2015 Survey in her message so she must think that you can do “apples to apples” comparisons and that the BMA surveys do have some significance and relevance. She says the tax burden on an average house in Meaford as a percentage of family income of about $80,000 is 3.26%. She goes on to say that this is lower than Parry Sound and Hanover.

The implication in her message is that Meaford tax rates are not that bad so please there is little cause for concern! Unfortunately whoever gave her this info from the 540-page 2015 report was terribly wrong or trying to present a better picture than the data showed. Perhaps they thought that no one in the public domain would have access to the most recent copy as MEAFORD DOES NOT PUT THE ANNUAL SURVEY ON ITS WEBSITE LIKE SOME MUNICIPALITIES DO? Maybe the mayor and council should put it on our website so the public can see how Meaford results annually compare against the other participants.

If you were able to review the 2015 survey you will see on page 462 of the 2015 report the property tax burden of an average residence in Meaford is actually 4.5% of family income, not 3.26%. We ranked as the 100^th highest by tax burden as a percentage of family income out of 104 municipalities. (Survey had 104 participants not 105 as the mayor stated). The average of the 104 municipalities was 3.7% so we were 22% higher.

By the way, both Hanover and Parry Sound were below Meaford’s number not above as per the mayor’s message. Our neighbours Grey Highlands, Saugeen Shores, and Blue Mountain were below the average and well below Meaford’s results. The actual results are quite different than those cited in her message.

Since the mayor is willing to cite statistics from the current survey even though she did so inaccurately perhaps everyone should carefully review a few other stats from the 2015 survey that shows that Meaford’s costs are too high leading to unsustainable high tax rates. Hopefully the upcoming Service Delivery Review will address these:

$ spent on General Expenses and Governance per-capita in Meaford are almost two times the average of the 104-member survey. This is the department that issues dog tags, marriage licences, collects taxes and other mundane basic services that all municipalities do plus it covers legal and other general expenses. Why are our costs so high? What extra services are we getting that other municipalities are not providing in this area? This expense area has nothing to do with the Hall, campground, marina, or pool which the mayor says make us unique. By the way, 3 of these 4 services are seasonal endeavours and should hardly affect the full time employee complement at all if managed properly.
Our cultural costs in dollars per capita are over three times the average spent by the 104 municipalities. Should we or can we continue to spend so much in this area when once-paved roads are returning to gravel and bridges are being closed?
The Total burden (property tax, water and sewage costs) on an average residential home as a percentage of family income in Meaford was 6.3%. The average for the 104 municipalities was 4.7%. We were 34% higher! We ranked 103 out of 104 as the municipality with the highest Total burden on ratepayers.
Percentage of tax receivables to taxes levied: The study says that this is a very important stat as credit agencies use 8% as a danger sign that a municipality’s taxes are too large a burden and ratepayers are having difficulty paying their taxes promptly. Meaford’s rate has been climbing for a few years and we are now at 7.9%, just below the Study’s critical rate. The average of the 104 municipalities is 6.5%.

According to the authors of the survey if this percentage increases over time which it has in Meaford, it may indicate a decline in the municipality’s economic health. We are already seeing this as economic development over the past couple of years is biased to the rural area and the Town proper has experienced little activity and has had a reduction of families moving into town, leading to a school closure and a shortage of younger workers for local small businesses. Yes, the Board of Education did recently say that there are plans for a new “super K-12” school but there are no time-lines and this is a probably a replacement for all existing schools in Meaford.

Suffice it to say I am extremely disappointed in the misrepresentations by our mayor, who has a habit of publicly admonishing groups who have different opinions on how to operate our municipality more efficiently. If the errors in her recent message were unintentional mistakes – fine, admit them, but if she was trying to manipulate public opinion about the upcoming Service Delivery Review (i.e. all is well in Meaford) then this is not acceptable and I believe she should apologize for spreading false information. This upcoming review is the most important endeavour that this council can do as our taxes are way too high as evidenced by the 2015 BMA survey (just like the 2014 survey).

In closing I do not totally disagree with the mayor’s message. Firstly I urge all residents to take the mayor’s invitation to attend all the meetings and tell her and the council that we are at the limit in our ability to pay any additional property taxes and we need new ideas to reduce the heavy burden we now have. This must include a reduction in spending on “wants” and the sharing of services with other municipalities. Please remember that any requests for more services need to be offset by a cut in something that the Municipality is doing now or our taxes will continue to spiral upwards. Secondly she is correct that Meaford is unique, but not for the above mostly seasonal businesses/services but because we are the highest cost, highest taxed municipality in Grey County, and if we do not do this Service Delivery Review correctly we will remain having this dubious distinction.

Barry Vallier, Annan