Amalgamation: A Future To Fail For
On January 15th, 2018, the City Saint John Common Council showed that it has no concept as to how they can fix, strengthen, or grow, the Saint John economy, in large part due to a lack of understanding the root causes of the city’s financial difficulties, and without a proper understanding of the cause it is impossible to properly design solutions; the city is attempting to design a quick fix solution around symptoms while ignoring the cause, and this will neither solve, not cure, anything. This conclusion is evidenced by the council’s vote to request a study be done on the issue of amalgamation between Saint John and the outlying communities.
The topic of Amalgamation is not new to the greater Saint John region. Amalgamation is discussed to death by common council at seemingly regular intervals, these discussion have become is little more than noise and soundbites designed to placate those who are suffering the most by offering them a snake oil solution that defies logic and really only highlights the city’s greed and lack of accountability, and most telling of all, a lacking of capacity for strategic thought.
There is no doubt that the City of Saint John is in a precarious financial position, but this will not be helped by amalgamation, in fact it stands in philosophical opposition to the city’s professed desire to create initiatives to bring more development and business to the city’s downtown core; you cannot resist urban sprawl by continuing to sprawl. This brings us to one of the root causes for the current financial state of the city, decades of unfeathered urban sprawl.
The city’s urban sprawl strategy can trace its roots to planning projections from over forty years ago when city officials predicted a growth rate for both population and industry in Saint John that failed to materialize. Based on these projections the city approved, and even encouraged, development and growth away from the core and expand its scope. This, in turn, drove the need to create more infrastructure and services across a much larger landmass that ultimately remained much more sparsely populated than it needed to be in order to support said infrastructure and services — as time went on this created a financial strain that grew as resources shrank. Amalgamation would again increase said strain and is more likely to impoverish the outlying municipalities than it is to enrich the City of Saint John.
As the years went on, the leadership of the City of Saint John continued to make poor choices, choices that have lead to a top-heavy management structure in the city’s staff and a small city works department staff that no longer has the manpower, resources, or equipment to maintain the infrastructure of the city; this was achieved by foolishly making cuts to personnel and maintenance budgets instead of looking for proper solutions; cutting the workforce is a short-term solution and short-term solutions will ultimately always lead to long-term pain. Again, this shows a long history of the city failing to understand why it was falling into dire straights and how to address it, so cuts were made to the rank and file while more management-level positions were created. A plan to reduce costs is not inherently a bad plan, in fact it must be regular practice, but it cannot be done at the expense of service and infrastructure, not in government, or at least not if you want a functioning government; remember, the metrics of business and government must be different, and so too must be their methods be because they have different goals and mandates, as well as different moral and legal obligations to stakeholders.
Of course, it is important to acknowledge that urban sprawl is not the sole major root cause of the current financial state of the City of Saint John, there is also legislation that creates a barrier. When municipalities collect tax money that revenue goes to the province who in turn allocates money back to municipalities, and the lion’s share of taxes collected in Saint John do not return to the city but instead are allocated to other municipalities by the province, this makes it impossible for Saint John to meet the obligations and needs that exist within the municipality. This is one contributory factor to Saint John’s fiscal decay that actually can be addressed with the help of the outlying communities, but it must be done through coalition-building NOT amalgamation. Instead of forcing a confrontation with the neighbouring communities where the potential outcome for them is to take on a greater burden that posses the potential diminishes their own quality of life, the City of Saint John should engage them in a positive light and invite them to join a pro-active movement with a proposition where they too can benefit. Saint John should become a leader in an initiative to address this issue, and in the process, this will solve one of the root causes of the city’s financial woes. It is time to change the game.
Other provinces in the country have re-written their municipalities act to allow the municipalities greater control over the revenue they collect. It should not be the role of the province to allocate, or re-allocate, municipal revenues from one municipality to another; this is an arbitrary abuse of provincial power. Saint John should approach its neighbouring municipalities and develop a coalition to lobby the provincial government to re-write this legislation so that the municipalities themselves retain the lion’s share of their collected revenue and send a smaller percentage to the province to cover some of the province’s expenses in maintaining their infrastructure to service the municipalities. This would be the first logical step in turning Saint John’s financial outlook around. This is not a quick or easy fix, it is a generational solution, a long-term approach to a problem that has been exasperated through too many short-term bandages across many decades.
This would take time, patience, leadership and strategic thought, first to show the other municipalities how this will positively impact them, and then to push the provincial government to make the changes, and then finally, over time and with smart choices the city can build up its own net worth and begin to repair and improve infrastructure and services. This leadership, and the improvements to the city that will come with it, will be the most attractive thing the city of Saint John can do to attract new future business, and when this time comes the focus of the city should be to attract new and innovative organizations that focus on the future and the emerging economies and not those tied to the economic models of the past; the existing allegiance to these out-moded paradigms on economic growth is a large part of what has lead to the fiscal decline of the municipality.
It is well past time for the City of Saint John to stop looking backwards in the strategic development of solutions by continuing to re-invent what has failed and passively accept the fate adorned them by the current incarnation of the rules and instead lead the charge into the future and force a change in structure. It is time to re-invent the rules that no longer work into a new set of laws that will lead to success in a changing world; the world is changing fast, and fighting to stand still will only leave the City of Saint John standing behind, waiting for streetcars, wooden ships, and horse-drawn buggies to come along.
