Budget and spending debate continues…

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To everyone who is participating in our ongoing discussions about Midland budgets and spending, we truly welcome your involvement and opinions.  It is encouraging when members of the community become involved and grapple with issues about where and how we should allocate our scarce public resources.

Please continue to send us your own ideas and solutions to the issues our town faces.  We need to hear them because we all have blind spots and favorite things that we convince ourselves must be important to everybody and paid for by the public because they are important to us.  The challenge is to make smart and often tough choices among many things we value.

Now a few words for those who have written to us or the editors of the local newspapers and criticized some things we have said.  Midlandcommunity.ca has no preconceived agenda with respect to Fire, Police or any other valuable service our town provides.  Our purpose is simply to inform, to explain and, yes, to present a reality check that is based on some undeniable facts.

The debate is not about whether services from Fire, Police, Recreation or Public Works are important.  We all agree.  They are all important and necessary services in our community.  The debate is whether collectively we are spending too much, too little or exactly the right amount on each of them.

In our personal lives we all know we have limited resources and have to make choices about how to allocate them.  If we overspend on one of the things we value, then we have less to spend on something else.  It is no different when we join together collectively as a town to provide necessary services to one another.

So the question is not whether we need to have a Fire Department for example – we clearly do need one.  But the question we do have to answer is what kind of Fire Service is required to meet our needs bearing in mind every dollar that is spent in one service area is a dollar that cannot be spent somewhere else.
For anyone who does not welcome this debate or think it is worth having, take a look south of the border where several towns and cities in the United States are now forced to make huge cuts to police, fire and other important services because they can no longer afford to carry on as they did in the past.  Or look at some European nations where excessive spending has made national governments bankrupt.
It is always difficult when we have to deal with questions about the level of public spending for our favourite things or deal with our other blind spots.  But we need to check our emotions at the door and remind ourselves of the facts:

1) Midland’s own taxes on the average house went up over 80% in 10 years from 2000-2009 while the Consumer Price Index went up only 20%;
2) The town’s payroll went up 93% in these 10 years;
3) Our population only increased 5%;
4) Spending per person for Parks and Recreation went up 215%;
5) Spending per household for Fire went up 97%;
6) We have the highest property taxes anywhere in Simcoe County on a new $300,000 home;
7) We have an aging population with many residents living on fixed or declining incomes;
8) We have the lowest income levels anywhere in Simcoe County both for individuals and households;
9) And we have the second lowest average home prices in the County  (Tay comes in at $190,000 with  Midland at $194,000).

These facts describe where we have been recently – clearly not where we want to remain.  But we need to be reminded of them occasionally.  They show us why it is important to help our town put its house in order so this great place can realize all its potential.

None of this is easy.  Our personal resources cannot provide us with everything we might think we want and neither can public budgets.  Collectively we will have to make some tough choices about the levels of public services we actually need to sustain our community and allow it to grow and prosper.

Midlandcommunity.ca

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