Monthly Archives: August 2009

Municipal, Snafu

Just say No.

Leave a comment

I distinctly remember attending and speaking at a council session in the spring of 2009 concerning Abbotsford’s 2009/10 budget. I also distinctly remember Abbotsford’s city council proclaiming the 2009/10 budget to Abbotsford’s citizens and that they had struggled mightily on behalf of the citizens and held the tax rise to “an overall increase of 5.5% to address key areas; a 2009 budget that protects key City services and provides support to the areas that need it most; Budget reflects the role of City government and responds to economic outlook” (to quote from the city’s press release).

So why is Abbotsford city council scrambling madly to separate taxpayers from millions more of their dollars this year and for year’s into the foreseeable future?

A budget is a financial plan. A household budget itemizes the family’s sources of income and describes how this income will be spent (housing, insurance, transportation, food and so on). Similarly a municipal budget indicates the municipal government’s income sources and allocates funds to police, roads, parks and recreation, wages, fire and the like.

Budgeting is, thus, a management tool used for both planning and control.

Fundamentally, the budgeting process is a method to improve operations; it is a continuous effort to specify what should be done to get the job completed in the best possible way. The budgeting process is a tool for obtaining the most productive and cost effective use of the city’s resources. Budgets also represent planning and control devices that enable city management and council to anticipate change and adapt to it.

Operations in today’s economic environment are complex. The budget (and control) process provides a better basis for understanding the city’s operations and for planning ahead. This increased understanding leads to faster reactions to developing events, increasing the city’s ability to perform effectively.

Clearly budgeting is a most important financial tool – if done properly.

I recently was dealing with getting an automobile on the road. I drew up a budget for the costs involved. I then drew up a budget for how the funds to meet these costs would be raised. Only after I was satisfied with the budget being realistic did I begin operations to get the car on the road.

It developed that there were a few unanticipated complications that had to be dealt with and that required extra cash outlays. My original budget had been realistic and so had covered the anticipated (major) expenses. The additional expenses were dealt with within my overall normal monthly operating budget. It required a shift of cash from budgeted expenditures to cover the additional expenses; decisions made based upon priority of the expenditures involved.

That is the way a budget works. You (should) know your income with a fair degree of certainty. You allocate how that money is to be spent. If there is an income shortfall for a undertaking such as getting an automobile on the road you need to increase the funds available to cover those new expenses (in the case of the city determine the tax increase to be imposed). Additional expenses (which, in a proper budget environment, should be minor) are handled, if considered a priority, through the reallocation of expenditures within the overall operating budget.

I apologize to the reader if the preceding paragraphs seemed a little dry. However, it is necessary to set out an understanding of budgeting in order to examine the actions of the City of Abbotsford and Abbotsford’s city council vis-à-vis the City’s current (past and future) Budgets.

I think that armed with even the most basic understanding of what a budget is, what a budget is for and what the budgeting process should involve makes it clear that no matter what city hall and city council call it, the document they called and approved as the 2009 budget was and is not a budget in terms of what an authentic budget entails and the information a bona fide budget contains.

If the document that Abbotsford city hall and city council approved had been a real operating budget, city council would not have had to immediately scramble around for additional revenue to cover operating costs. In a real, substantive budget those operating costs would have been covered by property taxes and the other revenue sources of the City of Abbotsford.

What city staff and city council continue to try to pass off as a budget is a document whose main purpose would appear to be to hoodwink the citizens of Abbotsford into accepting the fiction of a tax increase of only 5.5%.

Explaining why it was that after announcing and passing their fudged budget, council embarked on a search for the additional revenues needed to cover what the city’s actual operating costs were going to be.

The need for revenue to cover costs that the 5.5% claimes tax increase was inadequate to cover, is also likely why the city transferred $300,000 into each of water and sewer as ‘administration costs’ this year. That way the taxes needed to cover that $600,000 would be hidden from citizens in large water and sewer levy increases.

What about the five year 2009 – 2013 budget City hall and council passed? The need for investing hundreds of millions of $$$$ in infrastructure would have been part of any legitimate budgeting process with the result that funding to cover these expenditures would be or should have been included in the budget. There should be no need to scramble for large sums of additional revenue to pay for the needed infrastructure.
Indeed any responsible, any real long term budgeting process would have included the need for investing hundreds of millions of $$$$ in water treatment, sewage treatment, roads etc in the budget process that included Plan A.
All of which leads to the conclusion that Abbotsford city council has failed to engage in an accurate and proper budget process on both a yearly and long term basis over many years.

Budgeting is a planning and control process for delivering services in a cost effective manner – if done properly.

If done improperly, where the financial numbers used in the budgeting process are fudged rather than an accurate reflection of current (and future) operational needs and costs, you end up in the financial mess, the financial bind Abbotsford city council has put Abbotsford and the city’s taxpayers in – on the hook for hundreds of millions of $$$$ for infrastructure that should have been part of the budgeting process over, at the minimum, the past six years but that currently are unfunded and lack any financing plan.

The facts, the financial reality that is coming home to roost at City Hall, make it clear that budgeting, planning and control are effectively nonexistent for the City of Abbotsford – and have been nonexistent and/or ineffective for years.

Budgeting is a vital tool in managing Abbotsford and imposing discipline on city spending and operations. Pouring millions of dollars into bailing out city council and city staff will not remedy the demonstrated lack of a true budget process; it will only enable city council to continue it’s undisciplined, irresponsible financial behaviour.

Which is why the citizens of Abbotsford need to begin now to contact (with repeated regularity), their MLAs (John van Dongen, Michael de Jong, Randy Hawes), the Premier (Gordon Campbell), the Finance Minister (Colin Hansen) and Minister of Community and Rural Development (Bill Bennett) to urge them to “Just say NO” to Abbotsford city council’s request for a gas tax.

Since the current and future financial quagmire/crisis the City of Abbotsford faces demonstrates that current (and past) budgets were not accurate, realistic or effective tools for managing the city’s finances citizens can have no assurance as to the current true state of their city’s finances.

Despite statements made by city council members about the fact that the city’s financial statements are audited – anyone with experience with the audit process, especially as an auditor, is well aware of the inaccuracies and incorrect information an audited set of financial statements can contain. Remember that ENRON also had audited financial statements.

Which is why, among numerous other reasons, we need to urge the provincial government to have the provincial Auditor General do a thorough audit and evaluation of the financial/accounting records, results and financial position of the City of Abbotsford.

We need an accurate understanding of the finances and financial state of Abbotsford in order to have a accurate starting point to begin to impose financial discipline and properly planning and budgeting to meet the operating needs of the City of Abbotsford.

Citizens can continue to ignore city council’s financial irresponsible actions, finding themselves groaning under an evermore onerous tax burden, in order to bail city council out of their financially irresponsible ways.

Or risk becoming the residents of the first major Canadian city to go bankrupt as Abbotsford’s city council financially mismanages the City into destitution and insolvency.

Alternatively we can “Just say NO” to Abbotsford city council and stop enabling their spending addiction, and lack of financial responsibility.

Consider, Media

Nickel-and-Dimed to death.

Leave a comment

The nickel-and-diming to death of citizens by Abbotsford’s city council has moved from finding as many new ways (new fees, increased fees, zealous bylaw ticketing, etc.) to shake citizens down for as much of their cash as possible – to trying to save money by applying the same principles of nickel-and-diming to expense reduction.

This expansion of city council’s nickel-and-dime behaviour was predictable given the financial bind council has put the City in and their refusal or inability to make prudent spending and spending reduction decisions.

Instead of council making sound, financially responsible decisions, council has chosen the nickel-and-dime the public to death approach.

As if closing the Abbotsford Recreation Center pool four hours early on BC Day to save four hours of staff wages was not penny-ante enough, the City compounded this conduct by failing to adequately warn people that ARC would be closing at 6 PM.

I have been swimming at the pools in Abbotsford for nigh on 20 years and the pools have always opened late on long-weekend Mondays and stayed open to their regular closing time.

Sometime between Saturday 10 PM and Monday 4 PM a small notice, hard to notice because it was tucked out of the way, appeared setting out the change in hours. I know that this notice was not there Saturday at 10 PM because several of the regulars I had warned about this change scoured the admission desk and could find no notice.

I could warn them only because staff had asked me if I was aware they were closing at six on Monday.

This lack of notice leaves those returning from long weekend travel (and Monday evenings on long weekends travellers fill the pool) or who attended agri-fair and who want to go to the pool to cool off and relax – to arrive at ARC to find the doors locked and the pool closed. Let us not forget (as the City did) the regulars who, not having been warned, will arrive and find the doors closed.

To save four hours of salaries. Well, four hours of salaries less the admission fees forgone; which on the last night of a hot summer long weekend are likely to exceed the salaries saved. Resulting in it having cost the City money (income) to “save” paying wages. A rather pyrrhic victory on the “saving money” front; but then pyrrhic victories on saving money are all too often business as usual for Abbotsford’s city council.

Council’s inadequacies have placed Abbotsford in a financial bind at a time when it is facing the need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure to maintain the city’s liveability.

Citizens are not asking for brilliance, merely for competency.

Because unless we can manage to create a culture of competence at City Hall and on City Council we are in real danger of having Abbotsford become unliveable and/or the first Canadian city to go bankrupt.

Issues, Municipal, Poverty, Snafu

Preying on the Poor and Homeless

Leave a comment

Reprehensible, despicable, abominable, anathema?

Anathema, best begins to reflect the contempt I hold those who prey upon the poor in; a behaviour that is unfortunately neither unusual nor that rare in Abbotsford.

I spent time on July 31 paying rent and other bills which left me broke but secure for another month. I could do this because the monies due me were in fact deposited in my bank account.

I spent time on August 1 explaining to a gentleman what the rules were and what he needed to do to get a bed in the shelter that evening. He found himself in need of a bed at the emergency shelter because monies due him had not been paid. Sadly he was not the only person finding themselves in a bad situation because this “employer” had not paid people the wages they were due.

One of the other people who were on this job had been at the shelter when this “employment opportunity” came his way. Had been at the shelter because, with the long hours they were working, he had not returned to the shelter in order not to lose this “job” and the opportunity it represented to earn enough money to be able to afford an apartment and to start to get his feet back under him.

In doing the demolition on what had been the Grand Theatre in the Clearbrook Town Square Mall on South Fraser Way in Abbotsford they had been labouring hard 14+ hours a day to be done by the deadline.

These were not the only two victims who had the rug pulled out from under them once the job was finished. The friend I was sitting beside on August 1 had been telling me about others who had also been left owed a thousand plus dollars of wages for this job. After the gentleman had left my friend gave me a ‘what are you going to do about this’ look – a look he is very good at.

The people hired to do the hard labour during the demolition were homeless or poor in need of the money for rent so as not to join the growing ranks of homeless on Abbotsford’s streets or to get off the streets into housing.

They are each owed $1,000+ apiece and have been told there is no money to pay them what is owed, that they may get 25% of what they earned. Often in these circumstances they get nothing. Or only get the small “advances” given by the “kind, understanding” boss to keep them coming back and working hard.

To quote Samuel Butler: Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
This kind of behaviour is why temporary labour agencies have long lines of workers at their doors – better to get minimum wage and actually be paid than to “earn” double the minimum wage but never see a cent.

The poor and homeless are seen as powerless victims who, lacking power, are helpless to do anything about collecting the monies owed them. Prey to be exploited to line someone’s pockets.

In this instance, even if they thought about filing a lien, could they fill out the paperwork and then file their class action suit in small claims court?

Except … for a certain ‘what are you going to do about this’ look. I told my friend to pass along the fact that we can, should, will file a lien to get their money. That I can and will help them fill out the paperwork and file their lien to get the monies they earned through hard work if necessary.

If city council feels the need to pull business licenses or deny the ability to do business in Abbotsford they should apply this principle to those who prey on the poor and powerless, not just to those who annoy the powerful. They should be telling those who seek wealth by preying on the poor that this is not an acceptable business practice in Abbotsford.