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John Ranns: Good evening. I guess I was asked to come here to do a little myth busting.
To help you determine if a small population area can actually survive an incorporation
for any length of time.
I am talking about Metchosin and our experiences with incorporation and where we have come
to today. I was born and am a life time resident there, raised my family there. My wife is
sitting at the back. She comes to these things and has to put up with listening to me. So
what you are going to hear tonight is first hand observation - right straight through
the entire process. I am not going to guarantee my memory is that good but at least it is
first hand.
Metchosin has a lot of similarities with the small Shawnigan Lake model. Metchosin is the
second largest land mass in the CRD and the second smallest population. We have about
200 lane km of road. When you look at that, conventional wisdom says it is pretty scary.
We are not very conventional and it has not been a problem.
I will start with the beginning of government. Metchosin was a community like Langford and
we were all under provincial authority. There was no regional district. The province was
anxious to offload that responsibility so they started encouraging people to think in
terms of regional government. The first foray into that was called Mini-Metro I can remember,
back in the 60s, sitting in the Metchosin Community Hall - the Metchosin people were
very active, everyone turned out no matter what it was - big full community hall and
there was this guy telling us the virtues of Mini-Metro and someone asked the what it
would cost. He replied "I can guarantee you that all it will ever cost is one office,
one desk, one half time secretary." Mini Metro morphed into the CRD and it now has a $40
million annual payroll, $600 million of assets. That shows you how governments kind of grow.
That is kind of unfair because the services that the CRD provides are effective and it
is something that the residents have determined that they want to utilize and buy into.
We had CRD directors as it morphed into that, and they took us in various directions, but
they all bumbled along. The province kept saying you have to incorporate and they brought
out these incorporation studies. But they were done by the province primarily and they
were rejected. Over a fair length of time we rejected two incorporation studies. By
that they there started to be significant growth happening. Our neighbours - Colwood,
where Judith is a councillor, Langford, places like that - started to develop. Metchosin,
being a lifestyle community, strictly rural and determined to stay that way. Some us started
to think Metchosin should be looking for a different model. Not me. Just to show you
how smart I was, I voted against all three incorporation studies. I thought - we don't
need any more government. And here I am. We were very fortunate in that on the third incorporation
study we had some very good citizens who knew what they were doing. And they took over the
incorporation study essentially. They modelled it in a way that made sense for Metchosin.
They visioned it - and that was the key to the whole thing - to the extent that we could
see, or most of the residents could see, what the long term vision would come out of incorporation
if it was done as they said. And then they were able to fit the numbers to their vision.
And so it was approved.
These were the same people who had a lot to do with crafting out first official community
plan. Very important document. So, they went from the community plan to the incorporation
study and then 4 of the 5 people who did that got elected to the first council. Another
very lucky thing for us because these people knew what they were doing and had the vision
and built the foundation in the community that is still solid. Very much of what they
built we are still using today in terms of the zoning, in terms of processes that we
use and everything. Se we were really lucky in that regard.
That first council really did say that this was the vision, this is why we were elected
and this is what we are going to follow. The second council, and I got elected to the second
council thinking if you are not going to lick then you may as well join then. Besides, they
had already done all the heavy lifting and I could come in afterwards - it was a lot
easier. We, on the second council solidified that policy. And that second council and succeeding
councils, we all built on the foundation. We firmly established the principles to operate
on that would carry us through a lot of different problems and issues.
The fundamental policies were: start small. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. This
was another fundamental thing. We were determined that we were not going to borrow anything.
We were going to "pay as you go." So we established reserves and we still do that. Everything
we buy, every improvement we make, every road we fix, comes out of our reserves that we
have put money into. There is absolutely no borrowing. Another thing we decided early
on in that second council was "no spot zoning." We saw what was happening in a lot of other
areas where they started to allow very good proposals outside of their planned core. Well
we will put one over here and one over there and pretty soon you get infill all around
it. You have lost your vision. Our vision was a strictly rural vision. We did not want
to have any urban development. We wanted to stay with the lowest taxes. We wanted to have
the taxation based on the same sort of principle: the same properties, the same life style.
As soon as you start mixing urban concepts up with rural you get into trouble. And very
quickly the urban outnumbers the rural and voting strength and you end up with a lot
of things you don't want. You end up with the property owners, who have generally higher
assessments, paying money into things they don't need and don't use. Those were the things
we were talking about avoiding.
And another fundamental thing - we also in terms of the spot zoning we also said no rezoning.
The incorporation committee established the vision. The zoning maps were all done through
the CRD. They were set and established in our OCP and out land use bylaws and that was
that. Our principle was - the biggest investment a person makes in their life is their home
and their property and they have a right to believe that that is not going to be changed.
So, we stuck with the zoning. And our zoning map ... if you look at our zoning map today
it is identical to the zoning map of nearly 30 years ago. Some people think that is crazy,
but I will go on to explain why that worked for us. The OCP - here is out OCP. I could
talk to you for an hour about how important an OCP is to a small population community.
An OCP is a funny thing. A lot of municipalities regard it as you would your 5 year capital plan.
Yeah, sure they make us have one but it doesn't mean anything. You just change it. A lot of
people will say and quite proudly - your community plan is a living document. It has to change.
It changes as your community changes. But, if you have a vision in your OCP and you change
it then the vision dies. It is not living any more. If you have the vision you have
to stick with the OCP that permits that vision builds that vision. In Metchosin we said that
OCP is the bible. If you expect to get elected you have to agree to obey that community plan.
We almost have to stand there when we are on the podium to get elected and swear to
abide by the OCP and if you didn't they sure let them know about it in a hurry. So, that
enabled us to elect councils, council after council, that stuck with the vision.
One thing we did do though was we stuck with a conventional form of governance. And that
is something you are going to hear a lot about as you go through your incorporation discussions.
There is a very established conventional outlook on how to govern a municipality and we followed
that right up to 2005. The convention is you go out and hire yourself a CAO and a planner
and a CFO and then you hire this and you hire that, and on and on. If you are a small population
municipality you can't afford to pay the really big dollars to get the really good people.
So, you either get the people who are on the way up and are using you as a stepping stone
or people who are just looking for a place to park until the retire. In either case,
it is not that satisfactory. I went through a lot of years as mayor dealing with people
like that, who were good people but they weren't that experienced or they weren't giving us
the advice that we needed. And it was difficult as we went through that time period, it became
evident that we successful in controlling land use but we weren't that successful in
controlling costs and our administrative costs kept getting bigger and bigger. And what that
meant in a small community with the policies we had - pay as you go and no borrowing - it
meant that infrastructure started to suffer. The roads were mentioned. It is absolutely
key that you keep your infrastructure in good shape. When you are talking about roads and
infrastructure there is a cost point between capital expenses as you put them in and maintenance
expenses. If you don't spend on capital your maintenance starts to go up and it goes up
exponentially. So you have to keep a lot of capital into your infrastructure. We were
at a point where we were starting to get a little bit dicey. Could we maintain our infrastructure.
It was pulling away because of the cost. Well, in 2005 we came up with a brand new plan and
it has been a very interesting experience since then.
There are two basic philosophies in running a municipality. There is the conventional
one that says you have to expand your tax base to survive. The other one is that you
stay small and live within your means. Well, we of course did not want to expand our tax
base and we wanted to live within our means. We were starting to think, can we? So what
we did was we took a really hard look at what we have. We have a rural municipality. We
have an opportunity to do something entirely different. So we got rid of all of our senior
staff. We didn't shoot them. Through various means, over a 6 month period, out the door
all of our senior staff. We cross trained our unionized staff. Very small. We contracted
all of the senior services. You people have the same sort of opportunities because there
is a demographic now where there is a lot of highly experienced people that are retiring
but don't really want to get out of the game. So we hired, under contract, all of our senior
people on an as needed basis. There are two advantages to that and this is the most prominent
- the advice we get is so good. We get top notch advice and it has made a huge difference
to our municipality. But the advice comes with another bonus. If you add up the total
time for our CAO, who used to be the CAO of Victoria and before that the city of Kamloops,
very experienced guy, our chief financial officer who is one of the top guys in the
province (he travels all over the world), our planner and our engineer, it comes to
one full time equivalent. That is how much we spend on all of this good advice. Because
we just don't need them that much. And, in fact, our CFO, when we asked him if he would
come work for us on a retainer, he said yeah, I will do it on one condition - no reports.
Well, tell you what. That was absolutely the best thing that I wanted to hear because I
had spent years reading this crazy reports. You have all of your people there generating
all of this stuff because it doesn't matter what the job is the work will always be created
to fill the job, so you are reading these enormous reports and your head is about to
explode because you are trying to figure out what it all says. None of that now. Politicians
have to sit there and think for themselves. They can't sit there and let the staff make
up their minds for them because the staff aren't doing that. I could go on for a long
time about the advantages of having the culture that comes from having a fully contracted
senior staff. They are not there because of their jobs, they are there because they want
to be. THey don't need the money. You have to be nice to them, they don't have to kiss
up to you. It is very interesting. It has been a huge reversal of the way I was used
to operating a municipality and I like it.
This is what you can have if you have a rural community with rural servicing standards and
everyone on the same sort of playing field on taxation and on desire - what they want
out of their community. We are able now, because we are a small population that we can do things
that no one else can. And that, to me is the real advantage that we are getting out of
this incorporation. We can do other things. As soon as you get into an urban situation,
as soon as you have all those service demands, as soon as you have all the taxation disparities
you have to have a big staff, you have to go into the borrowing, you have to have sewers,
you have to have all this other stuff - curbs and gutters and everything else - and you
cannot do what we can do.
So, where are we? Right now we are a municipality with no debt, whatsoever. We have substantial
cash reserves - about $5 million. Everything we need in the future of all our capital plans
we can pay cash for. We have the lowest taxes per $1000 of assessed value of any municipality
in the region. We have up to date infrastructure. You talk about roads, we have probably some
of the best roads on the island. In fact, paving companies say that we do. We are in
the process of finishing off paving programs that will give us brand new road surfaces
in all our majors. We got two new bridges - we built two major bridges in our community
and paid cash for them. We got all new fire trucks. We don't need another fire truck until
2020. And a works yard. We got all sorts of stuff, right. And all of this was a concerted
effort on our part to divert money into this infrastructure to make us recession proof.
Again, because we got scared we might lose our ability to maintain our rural direction.
So we thought, to heck with that, we are going to make ourselves so that if something happens,
if grants dry up, if the economy fails, we can survive for several years if we have to
without putting a nickel into capital. We have built ourselves up to that point. And
we have kept all of our administrative structures in a situation that can respond to whatever
comes along. If the economy fails or we go into a recession or grants dry up, because
these people - all of our senior staff are on contract, we only use them when we need
them. If we don't need them we don't use them, it doesn't cost us anything. They are not
sitting their trying to fill their jobs and in doing so generate costs. We try to reduce
our fixed costs
as much as possible. And - I am getting the look here - so in summation we have put our
municipality on a road to long term sustainability. You can take a look at our books, you can
take a look at our plan, our capital plans, our projections, we can go the way we are
as long as we don't expand our population too much, as long as we don't do too much
other than what we are doing, we can go as long as we can foresee into the future. A
lot of municipalities can't say that nowadays.
The summation, what we are getting to here, is that we couldn't have done anything that
we hadn't - I don't know how many people drive in that area - but all you have to do is drive
through happy valley area of Langford to see what would have happened to Metchosin. We
would have been eaten up in no time. There would have been no life style as we know it.
We would not have been able to take advantage of the new fiscal models we are trying. And
it all would have been lost. We had to incorporate. But, even with incorporation, you still have
to make all the right moves. You have to know who you are electing, you have to have the
vision before you start, you have to be sure they stay with the vision, you have to ride
over the rough spots. You have to say - hell no, we can make this work. Those are the things
you have to do. If you don't, if you make one wrong move in this, you never get it back.
So, for us incorporation saved us. The right people saved us. The right attitude in the
community saved us. The community that said to all of us politicians - You've got to do
it. One of the things that we did when we started small - and it was the first mayor
who did this, a visionary - he said, we don't need a municipal hall. But we need property.
That is what they did. They bought 11 acres with a house on it. From 1984 till 1999 that
was our municipal hall. The living room was the council chamber. It had a stone wall with
a fire place - we used to light the fire place and we would all sit at this table. Well,
I will tell you what. When you are sitting at a table in a living room and the residents
are sitting that far away glaring at you, you toed the line. It was a very healthy environment
for keeping us on track.
So, I guess my message is: if you do it right, if you have the vision, if you establish the
right vision, if you elect the right people, and if you don't listen to conventional wisdom,
if you take a look at what can be done, you can do it. And you can do it well and comfortably
and it doesn't cost you any more money. In fact, in the long run it is probably going
to cost you less money - that is what we are finding. Rural communities now have the lowest
tax rates. The ones that have undertaken rapid growth rapidly found out there was problems
that came with that. It is too late then. The rural people - if you are all in the same
boat, you are all paying the same taxes, you all have the same vision - you put up with
not having all that happy stuff. People come along and say yeah we should do this, we should
do that, we say no we can't afford it. We will do it when we can afford it. And it is
the residents who determine that. They are the ones who keep the rein on the politicians
and keep them from doing stupid things.
It was difficult for us at first. When I first ran for office, I barely got in. I was saying
we don't have to be like Colwood, we can be different. And my friends would come up and
say - "Hey John you know you talked a good line, but you know you can't do that, eh?
Hell, you gotta have progress." Well, no. Progress to us is what we have done. And now,
now it is a complete reversal. Now, in stead of standing up and trying to convince your
residents - "Yeah, we can stay small. We don't have to do all this growth." Now you have
to defend yourself and say - "Hold on a minute. I can do it better than this guy can." The
residents insist that it stays the same. Because they know what they have got. They can look
at their future, they can look at their lifestyle and say "Man this works and we are keeping
it no matter what." It is so much easier now to do what we plan to do because people believe
it, have bought into it. And we have proven it.
So, my message when I speak in front of groups like this used to be: "If you want to incorporate,
incorporate for one reason - to control your own land use. You have to have apples and
apples and oranges and oranges." If you are rural, if you are living on properties, if
you have a lifestyle, you cannot have competing lifestyles or you will lose it. If you have
to compete with urban you will become urban. That used to be my message. Now there is another
message. And that is, there is a second reason for doing it this way. And that is, to take
advantage of the economic models that are available. The demographics are such now that
we can take advantage of all of this expertise that is floating around out there. We don't
have to do the conventional things. We used to do a highways contractor to look after
our highways. He was a great guy, Metchosin resident, kept everything really economical.
He died. What are we going to do? We would have to look at Mainroad. We though - "Holy
cow! Mainroad. We don't want Mainroad. You guys have got Mainroad." So we decided to
take a chance and take it over. With 200 lake kilometres of rural road we don't have urban
standards. We were able to look after those roads just fine with 3 employees. So we started
off with theses guys and they all knew what they were doing. They had worked for the contractor.
So got a guy in, a highways consultant to tell us what to do. We figured out pretty
quickly we didn't need this guy. These guys knew what they were doing. So we took these
guys and said - "Look you know what you are doing. If you take ownership of this we are
not going to give you a boss." So, they did. And, we don't. We have no administrative hierarchy.
Same as out office staff. They are self directed. Our CAO goes down there because he enjoys
it, he goes down there every week and tells them "This is what we want done." And they
do it. He keeps an eye on it and makes sure it is done and that is all we need. Those
are the things that you can do. Another example - I am going to get the real hook here. She's
... yeah. Just to give you an example of what can be done, our highways guys are also firefighters.
We make that a condition of the thing, so now if we have a fire call, because we have
a full volunteer fire department, we can have a full engine crew turned out during the day
time, anytime. Guaranteed. Those are the things that you can do when you've got that flexibility.
So, I guess I better get off here before I get embarrassed by Judith here. In a nutshell,
I have been through the process that you are considering. If you do it right, it works.
I have learned the hard way. On many things, I have learned what does not work. I have
learned the mistakes. And I have been lucky enough and stayed there long enough that I
could correct them. And I am here now to assure you that if you do want to go small and not
be part of a bigger unit, I really do think that you can do it, but you have to think
differently.
Thanks.