Skip to content

Opinion: How bad timing led to lost transparency in SCRD budget

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) announced it was postponing final consideration of its 2020 budget until March 12.
budget
Lori Pratt speaks during an SCRD meeting in 2019. On the right is Roberts Creek director Andreas Tize.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) announced it was postponing final consideration of its 2020 budget until March 12.

The news came less than a day before directors were set to vote, and one day after a formal letter to the board was circulated by the Sechelt and District Chamber of Commerce red-flagging the lack of clarity around 15 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions proposed in the budget, among other concerns. Coast Reporter had been asking SCRD officials its share of questions, too.

At the Feb. 27 board meeting, directors were supposed to decide whether to move ahead with the SCRD’s largest hiring spree in more than a decade. In fact, and as reported last week, with 15 new full-time equivalents in the budget, directors were set to approve more hires than in the last decade combined.

Those jobs will cost $1.1 million in 2020 and an additional million dollars in 2021, with most of the money coming from taxes and user fees.

According to chief financial officer Tina Perreault, new hires for 2020 go part of the way towards explaining why the operating budget had climbed by nearly $4 million in Round 1 to $42.94 million. Other reasons are solid waste operations, salary and wage increases, paying debts down for fixes to ports, and inflationary increases for contracts and other items.

But that operating budget figure is stale. Just two days before directors were set to vote on budget adoption, neither the updated capital or operating budgets from Round 2 had been completed and approved for public consumption. 

To say the least, it has been a difficult budget season at SCRD.

For starters, the timeline has been condensed because the regional district is transitioning to start its fiscal year in January.

Then there are the projects. Over the past few years, typical SCRD budgets have contained between 60 and 70 new proposals. In 2020, that number swelled to more than 150, and at least 70 projects are being carried over from last year.

For Perreault, whose division is short-staffed, that has translated to a crunch to get the final budget ready for adoption. It has led to stale capital and operating budgets.

And it’s also led to a kind of transparency logjam, and that’s most evident when looking at the staffing requests.

Some of those jobs, while contained in service plans, didn’t make it into the budget until Round 2, and were given vague descriptions.

For example, in November, the infrastructure department recommended creating a new division called “Strategic Infrastructure Initiatives” to handle all of the projects on the docket. That team would need a new manager and staff who specialize in “strategic planning and policy development, public participation processes and water conservation,” according to the staff report.

But it wasn’t until Round 2 that those jobs appeared as specific requests, defined, vaguely, as “various functions – strategic planning,” and “various functions – strategic infrastructure initiatives,” among others.

The descriptions were left intentionally vague, according to chief administrative officer Dean McKinley, because unionized employees at the SCRD are actively bargaining a new collective agreement.

“Right now the SCRD and the union aren’t completely aligned on what positions should be part of the union, and what positions should be excluded,” he said by way of explanation. Describing those jobs could jeopardize the negotiation process, and besides, said McKinley, how can they define jobs if they don’t yet know what the final workload is going to look like?

“Neither the union nor management are trying to hide anything, we just have separate processes that happen to be going on concurrently that require us to respect both so we can get through them both,” he said, adding, “There’s just some awkwardness because there’s a whole bunch of things that don’t exist yet, and we can’t talk about it yet.”

Why 15 FTEs?

The union negotiations do go some way towards explaining why some of the jobs seem so unclear. But why, suddenly in 2020, are 15 FTEs being added?

Chair Lori Pratt told Coast Reporter, “We have a number of projects that are already in progress, plus we have a number of other projects that are being added to the list. We already have staff coming in on weekends and working on the side of their plates. We have an ambitious strategic plan, we have a lot of water and infrastructure issues that need to be addressed, and in order to address these issues, in order to make these projects work, we need staff.”

So what about the vaguely-worded strategic positions? Pratt held to a broader vision. “We need to not just look at those things that we need to do – those musts – but we need to look at how we manage those in the future.”

The urgency of some of these issues, such as investigating wells, has been made loud and clear by the community, Pratt said, so the board created mandates and staff responded with resource requests to get the job done. Union negotiations have created “awkwardness” in how those jobs are described.

Which brings us back to time and transparency.

Round 2 deliberations were held two weeks ago. A draft financial plan, published on the SCRD’s website last week, past Coast Reporter’s deadline, included residential property taxes. But those tax numbers increased with the Feb. 26 release announcing the postponement, hours before the budget was up for adoption. The most glaring change was the District of Sechelt, which jumped to a 9.1 increase from 2.9 per cent in the previous draft. The other average residential increases, as of Feb. 26, are: 11.7 per cent for Pender Harbour, 8.7 per cent for Halfmoon Bay, 11.3 per cent for Roberts Creek, 10.6 per cent for Elphinstone, 10.9 per cent for Area F, 10.3 per cent for the Sechelt Indian Government District, and for the Town of Gibsons, 11.4 per cent.

In the Feb. 26 release, a rationale for the budget adoption postponement was also included: “The SCRD would like to provide the public more time to review the details of the proposed 2020 budget in its final form.”

The revised financial plan can be found at www.scrd.ca/budget

Looking at the big picture, the decision to hire staff to make strategic decisions and play catch up on major projects makes sense. It’s a wise, refreshing move, in fact. 

What has been absolutely unwise is the decision to bring more than 200 projects forward at the same time that union negotiations are ongoing while simultaneously changing budgeting timelines.

It risks inflaming distrust at a time when trust is essential for an ambitious board that just might have what it takes to get the job done. 

With this postponement, directors now have time to douse the flames and address the awkwardness. Here’s hoping they do.