Cost of fire, police unsustainable, AMO president says
The president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario says the cost of policing and fire fighting in the province is not sustainable.

TheStar.com
Aug. 18, 2014
Richard J. Brennan

The president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario says the cost of first responders — fire and police — in the province is not sustainable.

“We need to rethink how we deliver policing . . . .,” Russ Powers said Monday in a speech to 1,500 delegates at the AMO’s annual conference in London, Ont.

“When it comes to wage and benefit increases, police and fire are in a class of their own . . . and it is not sustainable.”

Among other things, the AMO president pointed a finger of blame at arbitration awards, saying it is about time to “restore confidence” in the arbitration system. Municipalities often complain that rich arbitration awards are unaffordable.

His remarks follow last week’s announcement by the Ministry of Community Safety and the Ontario Provincial Police that a new billing model is to be introduced that is designed to better distribute the cost of policing in those communities without their own police departments.

“The new model will provide a fairer, more transparent cost recovery process by ensuring that all municipalities pay their fair share of the base cost of policing,” OPP Inspector Bert McDonald, OPP Municipal Policing Unit, told reporters.

A spokesperson for Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s office said Monday: “We do recognize that some communities will see increases while others (will) see decreases, so the new model will be phased in over five years and will limit the annual increase to $40, providing stability and predictability for both taxpayers and municipalities.”

Tory MPP Ernie Hardeman (Oxford) told the AMO conference that “when municipalities are spending half their budget to deliver those emergency services it becomes a real challenge to deliver everything else that constituents need.”

Several municipalities reacted negatively to an 8.5 per cent pay-hike for the 6,300 OPP officers earlier this year, making them the highest paid in the province at the time. The catch-up follows two years of no increases. Municipalities complained the OPP award set off a domino effect with other forces demanding and receiving comparable increases.

Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi noted last week the average per-property cost for provincial police services in 2015 is estimated to be $355, compared to an average of $787 for self-policed municipalities.

In 2011, police in Toronto reached a four-year agreement that gave them a cumulative 11.5-per-cent salary increase. Toronto Police Service’s budget is roughly $1 billion — more than 10 per cent of the city’s $9.6-billion budget for 2014.

“We need to rein in policing costs. Ontario has the highest policing costs in Canada,” Powers said.

Toronto mayoralty candidate David Soknacki agreed that the costs of emergency services are not sustainable.

“He (Powers) is perfectly correct that the costs are marching on unsustainably. They are huge costs and they are squeezing out not one or two other public activities, but have the potential of squeezing them all out,” Soknacki said, adding that cutting here and there just won’t do it.

“We have to determine what we want from those services and figuring out how to deliver them. It will probably mean a systemic restructuring on how we undertake emergency services,” he said, noting that according to the city budget that police, fire and emergency medical service consume more than one-third of the average annual property tax bill of $2,585 in Toronto.