Morgan Ian Adams – A sense of reality…
By Morgan Ian Adams -
I have to thank the folks at the Collingwood General & Marine Hospital Foundation for providing a sense of perspective last night at Collingwood Town Council.
The foundation, which fundraises the capital equipment requirements for the hospital, came to council with an ‘ask’ of $1 per household, or about $10,000.
While $10,000 may be quite a bit for you and I, when it comes to municipal coffers it is but a drop in the bucket. And it gives a bit of a dose of reality to some of the debate about council’s donation account that went on last week, and are detailed over at Councillor Chadwick’s blog.
One of the things that was argued over — and at the moment I can’t remember the group in question — was whether to give a community organization $2,000, $1,000, or nothing at all; Councillor Mike Edwards actually made the comment at one point that $1,000 is “a lot of money.” Councillors took about 25 minutes or so wrestling with the question.
Yes, to you or me, it is a lot of money. But to the town? A quick calculation — based on the hospital foundation’s ‘ask’, and a municipal operating budget of a little over $36 million — is that $1,000 is infinitesimal. I worked it out, and came up with a figure that had a decimal point with a string of numbers behind it and ended with an ‘e-5′; multiplying it by the property taxes I expect to pay in 2010, and it came to a nickel. Yep, five cents.
And that’s what we’re doing, arguing about nickels, and dimes, and the occassional quarter; I typically lose more money in my couch cushions than what council would have saved me during that 25-minute debate. That’s what most of the huffing and puffing comes down to when it comes to budget time, but it looks good in front of the camera because we’re supposedly being responsible for taxpayers’ money. It’s probably costing taxpayers more in the salaries we’re paying department heads to sit there and avoid looking bored, or worse, frustrated…
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Posted by John Malloy
on Jan 28 2010. Filed under Collingwood.
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