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A new study released by the Fraser Institute shows Greater Sudbury is on the high end of Ontario cities when it comes to spending on government administration.
A report released Wednesday by Livio Di Matteo, professor of economics at Lakehead University, looked at how much municipalities in Ontario spend on non-frontline staff.
Di Matteo said frontline workers would include police, fire, snowplowing and road workers – basically city staff who deliver services to residents. Everyone else would be classified as “general government spending” – people who work to support the administration. They break down into three categories: governance, corporate management and program support.
What he found was that Thunder Bay had the highest spending on non-frontline staff over the last seven years, spending $250 out of every $100,000 in tax assessment. On the low end was Vaughn, which spent about $40 out of $100,000.
Greater Sudbury ranked third highest, at about $145 per $100,000 in tax revenue, out of the 28 cities in the report. By comparison, Sault Ste. Marie was second highest at about $180, while North Bay was 10th in the survey, coming in at around $90. Timmins had the lowest in the North, at around $60.
A second chart ranked cities in terms of the per cent of local tax revenue taken up by general government spending. Burlington came highest out of the 28 communities, spending 17 per cent of the tax dollars it collects on general government, with Chatham-Kent on the low end, spending just more than two per cent.
Greater Sudbury finished sixth, spending a little less than 10 per cent. That compares to almost 14 per cent in Thunder Bay, around 11 per cent in Sault Ste. Marie and less than six per cent in North Bay. Timmins again was the lowest in the North, at about 2.5 per cent.
On the phone from Thunder Bay, Di Matteo said his report was an indicator of where local government dollars go, but the complex way municipal governments do budgets means you can't draw definite conclusions.
For example, Thunder Bay reports its tourism costs as part of its general government spending, an item Di Matteo would argue doesn't belong there. So the size of general government spending could be under or over reported, depending on an individual city's budget classifications.
Unlike provincial and federal governments, it's tougher to determine how much is spent where because one city's frontline staff is another city's general government spending.
“Municipal budgets really aren't terribly transparent, considering how they really vary a lot across communities,” Di Matteo said.
“So there might be differences in how expenditures are recorded. But the best you can do is work with the numbers as they've been provided. So I guess the point of that post is how much of our city spending is on general government as opposed to direct programs, like police and fire and roads and sewers and transport, etc.”
While not definitive, Di Matteo said the report is a rough barometer of which governments have more bloated bureaucracies than others. With cities heading into budget meetings, it's a good time to look at where tax dollars are going.
And the comparison among the five Northern Ontario cities is striking, considering they all face similar challenges.
“They can all claim to be in sort of rural or remote areas with large areas to administer,” he said. “And they're all fairly large urban areas in terms of geography.
“The question, then, is does this reflect differences in accounting across municipalities, or is it an indicator of bloated bureaucracies?” Matteo said. “That isn't answered in the post because there really isn't enough data to sort of answer that question. But it is a question that people should ask -- particularly so early on in the mandate of most municipal governments.
“Budget season is coming, tax season is coming, and these are the kinds of questions you might want to ask in terms of how much is being spent.”
Longer term, he'd like to see municipalities do a better job of breaking down their spending, so residents have a better idea of how much tax money is being spent supporting the administration, as opposed to delivering services.
“If you look at the average municipal budget, they sort of put everything together and it's really hard to figure out how a large amount of it is being spent,” Matteo said. “I mean, I'm an economist and sometimes I have trouble sorting out what they're saying.
“And that's unfortunate because municipal government in a sense is the level of government that's closest to the public. It's sort of grassroots government and yet its budget documents are the hardest understands average citizen.”
