UARB slashes Halifax council size

Not unexpectedly, the Utility and Review Board has ruled that Halifax council will, after the October 2012 elections, consist of 16 councillors and the mayor. Presently, there are 23 councillors. You can read the full UARB ruling here.

I’ve been opposed to the idea of a smaller council for years. You can read my views on it here, here, here and here.

The city could theoretically bring the issue to the courts, but I don’t see that happening; the UARB decision is final. But I’ve been asked a lot of questions about this, so I’ll try to answer most of those here.

What happens now?

Over the next few months a council subcommittee will propose the exact boundaries for the 16 districts. Their recommendation will go to council, which could decide to tweak them, and then to the UARB, which can do whatever it wants with them. In the past, the UARB has made significant changes in district boundaries.

Won’t this save the city lots of money?

No. As the UARB ruling notes (pg 36 & 37):

f) Cost savings
[143] A number of the letters of comment and evening presentations suggested that reducing the size of council would result in cost savings.
[144] Mr. Fisher, Acting Chief Financial Officer for HRM, testified that the savings resulting from a smaller council would be relatively insignificant in terms of its impact on the tax rate.
[145] Mr. Mills acknowledged in his final argument that cost savings are not the motivating factor behind his request for a smaller council.
[146] The Board concludes that potential cost savings are not a material factor in assessing the request by those seeking to reduce the size of HRM’s council. Any reduction would likely cause support costs for the remaining councillors to rise and negate some of the savings occasioned by the reduction in council size.

In practical terms what will happen is this: Because the 16 councillors will have larger districts and more constituents, they’ll want more staff to assist them and, possibly, district offices. The costs of these additional staff members and offices, as well as increased car allowances, will cancel out any savings realized from reduced council pay.

Won’t a smaller council reduce “parochialism” and get councillors thinking about the common good of the entire city?

Why should it? If the two councillors today from Clayton Park are overly concerned about the issues of Clayton Park to the detriment of the city as a whole, why will replacing them with one councillor make that single rep less beholden to the constituents in Clayton Park? There will still be the same neighbourhood demands, the same perceived need for things like the Bayers Road expansion that Clayton Park residents say they need, etc. There’s no reason to believe that an elected politician representing the people of Clayton Park will suddenly decide to not listen to the people who elected him or her.

Won’t a smaller council mean they’ll stop debating silly issues like cats and chickens?

First of all, Halifax council has never debated chickens.

But sure, in the past issues like cats and cat bylaws have been debated, just like they have in every city in the western world. Residents have concerns about things like cats, and politicians respond. That some people in the community think that cats are a silly issue doesn’t negate the fact that an awful lot of people don’t; rightly or wrongly, for a lot of people, living next door to a house with 50+ cats (which is how the cat bylaw discussion got started) is a really big deal. To simply write it off as a “silly” issue is to say that the views of a large segment of the community don’t matter.

To be sure, there are probably better ways to deal with issues like the cat bylaw. Maybe such issues could’ve been dealt with at the community council level, leaving council for the mythical “big picture” discussions. (But probably not: I don’t see how you get an enforceable cat bylaw—if that’s what’s desired— without also having a cat pound, and that would cost big money, which should probably be dealt with at the full council level.)

But even if the “these issues should go to community council” argument is persuasive, here’s the deal: the UARB decision does nothing at all to empower community councils to deal with such issues. If community councils are to get those powers (and there are arguments why they shouldn’t), it’s going to take multiple amendments to the city charter and the Municipal Governments Act, and there’s no hope that such changes could be made in the next few years. So we’ll have all the downside of a smaller council, but none of the benefit of the more powerful community councils.

For myself, I don’t see a contradiction in having council debate the mythical “big picture” stuff and smaller issues like cat bylaws. If they’ve got to meet twice a week, so be it. How is that a problem?

Won’t a smaller council be a more effective council?

What does “more effective” mean, really? I can’t help but think it means that council will become a less reflective body, with less patience for citizen input, and less inclination to change its mind in the face of changing circumstances.

Will fewer councillors be more effective in responding to citizens’ complaints, or less so? Is it more effective to get a councillor to address a pot hole when the councillor lives around the block, or when she’s clear across town?

People bitch about council “bickering” and the slow decision-making process, but in my view that’s precisely what council is for. We have a complex community, with a broad and varied populace with changing and often conflicting needs. A lot of debate is called for!

Won’t a smaller council mean that council will be run more like a corporate board?

Maybe. But city hall is not a business; it’s a service to citizens. Governance is necessarily messy and sometimes nasty. Even embarrassing. That, folks, is the human condition. To expect government to not reflect the people it represents is to be anti-democratic.

And people should be careful what they wish for. Already, the real power at city hall rests with the bureaucrats. Councillors have some ability to interfere on behalf of citizens—just yesterday I was talking to Mike Turner about his battles with the bureaucracy, and he said the only positive part of the experience was the intervention on his behalf by Jennifer Watts. To reduce the number of councillors is to reduce the number of citizen advocates with real power in city hall.

In the end, it’s clear that the “small council” argument was a demand of the business community. The UARB gave “formal standing” to Don Mills, the creator of Citizens for Halifax, the political group with a business agenda, and to Allan Smith—Smith did not testify, leaving Mills as the only member of the public given formal standing to speak before the board. And the Chamber of Commerce was heavily represented among those who submitted letters on the issue.

Well-heeled businesses of course will always have insider access to elected reps, no matter how few of them there are. It’s the rest of us who will now be that much removed from our representatives.

This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.