Municipalities: Resume or Rebuild?
Normal. After health and safety concerns, the most common crisis impulse is to get back to ‘the way it was.’ Including professionally.
Let’s distinguish, however between reverting to the status quo after a break like the one we’re experiencing, and continuing to do something the way it’s always been done under ‘business as usual’ circumstances.
For staff eager to get back to operating as they did pre-COVID-19, we have a request: Acknowledge the choice in either resuming or reconsidering your existing processes.
For people looking to go beyond patching the gaps in policy and procedure exposed by the disruption and re-consider some of the fundamentals whose logic produced the gaps, we have a request for you too: Keep reading.
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Since provinces create municipalities through rules and requirements, every municipality can be said to start with an externally determined operating logic, or operating system, like a computer. Whatever local policy municipal leaders layer on top of this foundation, traces of the genetic coding from incorporation by statute and evolution through changes initiated elsewhere remain. Invisible to the day-to-day operations, but exerting influence. And the coding runs deep.
In a Yes, Prime Minister discussion about whether or not the British Parliament should reform local government, a senior civil servant said, “British democracy recognizes that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians ... and we are that system.”*
For people who have been on government payroll, a more familiar version of this belief is the inherent value of consistency – which is a nicer way of saying centralized control. It’s made manifest in meetings where someone is presenting a new approach and heads start nodding once they frame it as, “For consistency, …”, “To be consistent with past practice, …”, or “To avoid any inconsistencies …”.
Standard-setting is, of course, one of the reasons we have government.
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But what kind of government do we have at the municipal scale?
Anyone who’s heard the expression “that’s above my pay grade” or seen a portrait of the Queen of England in Council Chambers is familiar with the tradition of deferring to a higher power.
The logic of centralized control and deference to 'real authority' is one way to make sense of the decision to incorporate hundreds of separate entities to plough the snow so often when it accumulates so fast, or put a specific sign up within so many meters of a turn in the road – as elected local governments. It simultaneously spreads the perception of decentralized control, of diffused power, while challenging ‘muni’s’ to do more than follow the rules.
A by-product of this intergovernmental dynamic is that municipalities’ self-image revolves around providing services - it’s the first thing most staff or politicians will say in response to the question, “what do municipalities do?” In this context, municipalities can be understood as ‘doing governments,’ compared to provinces, which can be likened to ‘thinking governments,’ (developing policy, coordinating programs across arms-length organizations).
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So what? What does our broad commitment to consistency and stability mean for the adaptability of our public institutions? What answers does it offer in times of crisis?
That’s the rub.
While we’re talking about better emergency preparedness, climate adaptation, asset management, infrastructure resilience, future-readiness, etc., as a sector, a lot of the sub-text of speaker presentations or ‘how-to guides’ reads, ‘think more about what you’re doing.’
But before we set our sights on creating what comes next, let’s look at why we in the municipal sector did what we did, what had to have ‘made sense’ for us to have taken the actions we took, to focus on ‘doing?’ Why weren’t we thinking about these things on our own accord?
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The stock answer:
As ‘creatures of provinces,’ for the most part, municipalities do what they’re told. Which is a lot. And it takes more time than most municipalities have staff. Doing discretionary work - when? Who? At the cost of being non-compliant elsewhere?
What if the sector disagrees with what it’s told?
Without the power to say ‘no,’ the strategy to effect favourable changes is to be helpful, to enable the province to accomplish its objectives more effectively by demonstrating how changes are in the provincial interest, raising feasibility issues and refining its implementation plan with 'on the ground' know-how.
Feudal, sure. We know our place, don’t draw outside the lines, expect little and lavish praise for consultation and financial aid. And it's understandable - when there is no stick, the carrot looks pretty good.
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Here’s a deeper cut at the impact of some of these patterns of thinking.
After all, what was so offside about the sector's long-standing request for the power to host Council meetings on the internet? Why did it take a global pandemic in 2020 to force the regulatory hand forward?
The most persistent takeaway from provincial-municipal interactions is arguably this: It doesn’t matter if the outcome doesn’t make sense. The benefit of having control is it doesn’t have to make sense. The province is not accountable to the sector. There is no consequence if stated intent doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; argument, evidence to the contrary, unintended consequences - who’s counting?
For some Treasury staff, over time, one of the lessons learned from ‘don’t expect it to make sense’ can be, don’t waste your time trying to make sense of it, it's happening, now, how are we going to deal with it? It makes not thinking, going almost straight to considering implementation options, make sense - because let’s not forget, that’s the win from many intergovernmental negotiations: Flexibility. We get to decide how to comply with the legislation. (Just like the Liquor Board.) In contrast to the amount of time and money you’ve likely invested into developing how you think, the dynamic teaches you to discount your curiosity at higher levels of abstraction. It discourages analytical thinking because you know you'll never have access to the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of ‘what’ you’re doing. It conditions disassociation between what you think and the work you’re doing, (returning full circle to why not thinking makes sense, and why ‘think more about what you’re doing’ is unconstructive advice given the system’s incentives).
Especially for small municipalities, the cumulative impact is that the top financial minds in the organization are so busy doing - submitting, reporting - for the province, they have almost no time to stop and think - brainstorm, research new approaches, connect with peers, develop policy, plan - for Council.
CPA Ontario situates compliance with legislation under the “professional competence” pillar of its set of fundamental ethics and section 299(3) of Ontario’s Municipal Act gives the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing unlimited power to require any information from municipalities; both professional standards and operating requirements reinforce the primacy of provincial directives inside municipal offices and key staff workloads, of answerability to the province.
Keeping in mind that the municipal sector was founded on the basis of distrust of local authority, when we shift from doing to planning through policy development, what kind of policy do we draft? Many of the gaps that emerged during the crisis stemmed from a codified lack of trust between Council and staff, and senior staff and junior staff. For example:
Low staff procurement thresholds. Hand-to-hand delivery of bid documents. Insufficient contingency funding. Limited, if any, ability for staff to work from home. Scepticism of technology.
Notwithstanding the founding logic, it wasn’t a given that these would be the cracks in the system; but it does help explain why they are so common. As well, why many of the breakdowns were around a lack of financial planning and saving for events that might not happen - we would expect this behaviour from ‘thinking governments,’ but if it were that important, municipalities wouldn’t have a choice. Like they don’t about snow ploughing frequency.
The cost of suspicion among municipal staff and Council - the make-work produced by low procurement thresholds, stale software, control-based management, etc. - surely bloats local budgets. But the status quo needs no accounting, no staff report, no “Financial Implications” section; it’s change that requires costing and buy-in. So the cost of various operating inefficiencies, many process-based, are absorbed as a matter of course, (‘due diligence’) silently pushing other spending out of reach, out of sight and out of mind.
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In the coming months, as we get on with the policy and procedural updates needed to accommodate new requirements and patch the cracks and gaps in our systems, three things are clear:
The reason to open up a policy needn’t determine the scope of a review.
No one knows for how long this window of opportunity will be open to choose new values to write into the documents that guide and govern us.
In spite of the costs, (as above) there’s nothing like a crisis to justify greater centralization.
Whatever the new normal is for your municipality, whatever logic or sense you want to program into its post-COVID-19 financial framework, know you don’t have to do it alone.
*Here is the full clip from Yes, Prime Minister.