Perhaps the amount is insignificant in the grand scheme. After all, a mere $65,000 drop in provincial funding for Estevan taken in context of the complete budget, is a drop in the bucket.
In fact, city officials appear to shrug their shoulders, accepting their fate as delivered to them by their friendly provincial funding agency. "It is what it is," they seem to say. And they may be right, especially when they feel there is nothing they can do about it and secondly, the promise, which was being touted by the province last week, is to make up for the loss, next year.
The funds in question come from a one per cent take in the province's five-per-cent sales tax. Estevan is getting about $2.3 million through this revenue-sharing vehicle for 2014-15. When we consider the fact it was less than $900,000 six years ago, it's difficult to slap this gift horse in the mouth.
The provincial government is definitely doing the right thing and if their accountants tell them they were making errors in counting cash and needed to tweak the system this year, who are we to question the money changers?
What is disconcerting is that with a rapidly growing city like Estevan requiring every dime it can find to apply to a deteriorating infrastructure base, even a little dip in the anticipated revenue stream can create a negative domino effect. We need the money now, not in 2015-16. This is not the cry of a greedy, self-centred brat of a city that doesn't know its proper place in the pecking order. It's the cry of reality.
We wish the provincial government would use a similar set of formulas to dispense funds to regions where they are needed the most, i.e. the areas in which they are reaping the largest benefits.
Is there no way in which to allocate a few percentage points of resource revenues back into the regions where the action is taking place, in a more efficient and timely manner?
What is the province's annual royalty take from oil wells in southeast Saskatchewan? Huge.
We know the sale of Crown land for oil and gas rights in southeast Saskatchewan alone allows the province to rake in $2 to $10 million every two months. Why can't a two to 10 per cent "take" from those revenues be dispersed among the region's municipal governments in a timely fashion? In this new world of technological quickness that type of bookkeeping agility is easily at hand. There just needs to be the will, or the pressure being applied, to make it happen. If it could, then communities that are directly impacted by resource production, would have a steadier stream of revenue that would allow them to replace worn out roads and pipes in an efficient manner, rather than having to go to Regina every few months, hat in hand, to do the obligatory begging.
We understand government gurus feel the need to wrestle with our funds for more than a few months before releasing them into the wilds of rural Saskatchewan, where the billions are being made. It's as if there is a feeling that the bureaucracy needs to be fed first, not the army. We all know that old adage that an army cannot march on an empty stomach. Likewise, resource sectors cannot continue to produce without cash infusions on a regular basis.
The provincial government has found one good avenue in which to dispense one stream of our revenue. They need to extrapolate that system to dispense resource revenue too.
