Troy Media – By Mike Bridge

Regina must learn how to measure whether it’s getting its money’s worth. The recent $50,000 pay raise for City Manager Glen Davies is just one case in point.  Davies’ raise presents taxpayers with two useful questions: Do you want someone in charge who knows how to run a $386 million operation? And how well is that operation run to justify (or not) the pay raise, and, for that matter, the salary?

The answer to the first question is easy, at least in theory: A manager of an almost $400 million entity can expect to be remunerated well for competent management; incompetence costs a lot more. So Davies’ raise may well be justified.

Performance information is lacking

The answer to the second question is the problem. Taxpayers don’t actually know how well the city of Regina is performing. That’s because transparent performance measurements aren’t clearly featured in the city’s annual report.

For example, public transport was a key performance area cited by Mayor Pat Fiacco as a reason for the pay raise. However, read the city’s annual report, and one struggles to see useful performance measurements. The simplest, most important metric that voters might look for — the level of ridership compared to last year — isn’t available in the report.

Compare this to Prince George, BC, which has performance indicators for annual ridership, rides per hour, number of annual complaints — even the average response time to complaints. Closer to home, Saskatoon publishes similar information, including the number of annual rides, decrease in trip denials and overall increase in public-transit ridership.

Davies’ success in providing municipal recreation facilities is also cited by councillors. Again, the city’s annual report lacks substantiation for this claim. While the report discloses that $79 million was spent on ”parks, recreation and community services,” there isn’t any information about public utilization of these facilities, nor are there data on value for money.

Christchurch, New Zealand, sets good example

The city of Christchurch in New Zealand measures the number of visitors to its Botanic Gardens, the area of urban park per 1,000 residents and even the provisions of recreation facilities per 1,000 children. Kelowna, BC, and Prince George each have similar performance measurements, including the timeliness of park servicing and the percentage of weed and disease invasion in municipal-parkland grass.

It’s not that Regina necessarily performs badly in these areas; rather, there is a lack of information. There are 10 expenditure items in Regina’s annual report but only four have objective performance measurements. This also compares particularly badly to Christchurch, which measures the performance of nearly every area of expenditure. In its annual report, Christchurch discloses the cost of each service, a numerical performance target and the actual performance result.

Informing residents about the cost of a service tells only half the story. To provide better insight into the value for taxpayer dollar, it is necessary to disclose not only the cost of a service but also the number of people who use that service.

A laudable exception

A notable and laudable exception in performance reporting at City Hall is with regard to water — wastewater and drainage expenditures. In this case, a comprehensive performance report is available but, perhaps tellingly, this is a provincially mandated requirement specific to water and wastewater rather than an initiative generated by City Hall.

This isn’t the first time Regina’s performance measurement has been questioned. In July the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) ranked Regina 17th out of 31 cities, well below second-ranked Saskatoon. Rather than taking this as an opportunity for improvement, councillors made bizarre claims that the institute was prejudiced against Regina because its findings were published in Maclean’s.

But at the same time that councillors were mocking the AIMS study, Davies pointed out that the city hadn’t provided AIMS with any data. Whatever the accuracy of the report may be, it was not helped by a city which makes it almost impossible for anybody to measure its performance.

If the chief executive of a private company went to stockholders requesting a pay increase while simultaneously withholding evidence of his or her performance, that CEO would be laughed out of the boardroom. Paying good managers sound market rates is to be expected, but let’s have some measurement criteria to make sure the salary and raises are justified.

Mike Bridge is a policy analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (www.fcpp.org) and author of Pulling Back the Curtain: How Transparent are Regina and Saskatoon?

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