We’ve recently had the privilege of defending ourselves against the accusation that we are the “least efficient” regional district in BC, thanks to a very peculiar report published by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Why CFIB have suddenly taken an interest in regional districts (most of Canada has never heard of us, as we discover when we attend national events) is only one of the mysteries behind the report lobbed at us on September 3. I read it with a sort of fascinated bafflement that has only increased as various colleagues have dived deeper into the numbers and reported back. (If you are interested in more detail, drop me an email.)
First off, it should be no surprise that regional district spending has risen more than population growth or overall inflation. We were specifically set up to handle large regional infrastructure such as garbage disposal and drinking water. These systems are aging, require very large investments to maintain or replace, and are heavily impacted by soaring costs in the construction sector as well as global supply chain problems. They also require staff with technical qualifications, a job market which is hugely competitive right now, creating salary inflation. And in recent years the province has downloaded a ton of extra responsibilities, including emergency management—something that used to be mostly a desk exercise, but is now an annual scramble to respond to fires, floods and drought.
Although we are castigated in the text, a graph on page 12 of the report shows that the SCRD has the fourth LOWEST total expenditures on administration of any regional district in 2023, and on page 13 we are bang in the middle of the pack for administrative costs per capita.
The report seems to have been written by a summer intern who had no idea how regional districts operate and it’s riddled with errors. For instance, it complains about long waits for business licenses. Well, yes, that WOULD be a long wait, since regional districts don’t issue business licenses. On another page it complains that regional districts have raised business taxes. Really? We don’t set the tax rate for business and industrial properties (e.g. the mill at Port Mellon)—the province does, and they don’t consult us.
Regional districts are almost impossible to compare with one other, since each one operates a unique set of services in a unique geographic setting. We have a very large budget for our population size because we are one of the few RDs in BC that is responsible for delivering most of the public drinking water, all the recreation facilities, and public transit. If you look at Powell River as a comparison, those services are operated by the City of Powell River, not qathet Regional District.
CFIB says that 3 in 5 businesses have minimal interaction with their regional district. No kidding! Most businesses in the SCRD are located in municipalities. (Area E’s tax base is 98% residential). We don’t issue business licenses and we don’t set commercial tax rates for the rural areas, so except for developers, most businesses are not likely to interact with us.
Some final mystifying suggestions in this report are that the province deal with our inefficiency by INCREASING its bureaucracy (reinstating the Auditor General for Local Government), and that regional districts set up MORE committees (governance committees) to improve our accountability.
I could go on and on about this report, but I’ll stop here. Certainly there are problems with the regional district system, and I’ve had a great deal to say about them in the past. But “administrative bloat” is not one I’ve seen serious evidence of, and if it exists, it is certainly not unique to regional districts. This report has all the earmarks of someone cherry picking evidence to support the CFIB’s ongoing war against taxation, and somehow we landed in the crosshairs.
