The City of Yorkton will be reviewing its Fire Protective Services.
That is not necessarily surprising since each year when Council begins its budget deliberations the costs of operating the Fire Services comes up.
At present the department costs taxpayers a sizeable amount. The net cost of operating the fire department budget 2015 was $2,503,236 which is more than the City’s streets and roads budget. The fire department represents 12.3 per cent of the City’s operating budget and when including the fire hall debt the total cost is higher.
In an era when the City faces ever increasing demands, and a taxpayer base already facing five per cent hikes in their taxes on a seemingly annual basis just to keep pace, there is a need to begin looking at where dollars are best spent.
In this case the City “has engaged Dillon Consulting, experts in the sector, to review our current fire services model,” stated a formal release to the media.
It is hard to argue with a review, and while it might be argued it should be all encompassing in terms of spending, there is merit in targeted explorations as they often allow for fine tuning of program spending which can save money over the longer term.
However, this review begs the question what the cost of a consultant will accomplish.
“The review will also look at the service delivery options for fire protection services, both within the province and across the country, that include a wide range of operating models including full-time, volunteer, auxiliary and paid on-call firefighters in identifying the most effective and efficient operating model providing the most value to the City of Yorkton,” the press release stated. “In addition, the Fire Protective Services Review will consider the three lines of fire defence, Public Education, Standards and Enforcement and Emergency Response.”
That sounds like the review will cover a rather wide swath of possibilities, but let’s not forget a lot of this is already well-known to the City of Yorkton.
In the past 20-years they have been in binding arbitration hearings with the city’s firefighters on a number of occasions.
The heart of arguments on both sides of such hearings is to cite comparables with other jurisdictions. The cost of other fire departments has to be at the fingertips of the City already if they did their homework from recent hearings.
It is likely in building arbitration cases there was also some effort put into looking at what volunteer forces cost as well.
In the end the key question that needs to be asked is if this Council has the resolve to make a dramatic change?
And, if so what it would take to make a change worthwhile?
It is, for example, unlikely Council would opt for a force change to save three or four per cent a year on costs.
But, are they willing to go down a path of change for 10 per cent? Twenty per cent?
This process is only a worthwhile one if the members of Council have the resolve to make change if the savings warrant. If not, the whole review may do little but to once again strain relations between the City and its firefighters, something a long history of forced arbitration hearings has often strained in the past.
