SIMS: If London isn’t Ontario’s capital for taxpayer frustration, it should be

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I did a quick review of the slick Power-Point presentation made for London police that we taxpayers paid for to help persuade taxpayers to pay a lot more taxes.

It sure is pretty. Part of an overall communication package called “A Safer City,” there are lots of colourful graphs, fancy typeset and dire warnings that London’s police force is understaffed and overworked, traffic tickets are down, fatal vehicle crashes are up, that the service has the lowest investigative clearance rate in Ontario, and that London is the third most dangerous city in the province.

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My word. Instead of city council rubber-stamping a $168-million police budget for this year alone – a total of $672 million over four years, from 2024-27 – and raising property taxes by a whopping 8.7 per cent mostly because of that one budget item, perhaps there should have been a city-wide warning to lock our doors and stay in our basements.

It would have been cheaper. The municipal embarrassment of the week is that the London police board spent $104,000 – about the salary of a first-class constable that police officials say they so desperately need – on crisis communications firm Navigator. The bill, uncovered by The Free Press, was to create what police board chairperson Ali Chabar called “an open, detailed and professional communication plan” to convince politicians and the public to fork over more dough.

Navigator is often called in to clean up public relations messes and shore up stained images. Given the recent series of local budget boondoggles, they might have more clients in London than they can handle.

These past few months have been both embarrassing and infuriating for Londoners who’ve been told that three of the largest public institutions in the city – the police, the hospital and the public school board – have been facing financial peril while bellying up to the trough.

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The results look like an unprecedented mismanagement of taxpayer money. See Exhibit A: London Health Sciences Centre, a world-renowned gem of medical excellence that’s expected to have a whopping $150-million deficit this spring, even though it was warned two years ago to get the budget balanced in five years.

There were complaints that the management structure had become way too top-heavy. Last fall, in the middle of this budget crisis, Ontario’s ministry of health was investigating after hospital officials planned to spend $500,000 on three trips by senior executives. Twenty-two went to Portugal and the United Arab Emirates, but once the cat was out of the bag, the junket to Australia was cancelled. Sorry, mate.

CEO Jackie Schliefer Taylor, who, with an $800,000 salary, was Ontario’s highest-paid hospital executive outside Toronto, stepped aside last spring after three tumultuous years. Recently, under interim CEO David Musyji, 59 management positions, including five executive jobs, have been eliminated, saving $14 million. That’s a few shovelfuls of dirt to fill in a big hole.

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But wait, hold my hotdog, said the Thames Valley District school board, itself in a deep financial doo-doo. The board passed a $1.2-billion budget in the spring but had to slash teaching positions and field-trip funding to the tune of $11 million to wrangle the deficit down to $7.6 million.

While kids have been deprived of extra educational enrichment activities, The Free Press has reported education director Mark Fisher, now on paid leave, made an astonishing $326,000 – more than the top official at the larger Toronto District school board, while others at Thames Valley received pay bumps from 12 to 33 per cent.

To add insult to injury (and I’m not talking about the Toronto Blue Jays dismal season), more than $39,000, roughly the annual salary for one more educational assistant to help a special-needs student, was spent to send 18 senior staff to a three-day retreat at the hotel inside the Blue Jays stadium, a trip uncovered by The Free Press.

So much for putting the kids’ best interests first.

What’s deeply troubling is that the hospital and school board have boards of their own that should be overseeing the financial responsibility of the organizations. Score errors on both.

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And score a big error on the board overseeing London police that has blissfully gone along with the big budget grab.

That $104,000 taxpayer-funded sales job helped ensure city council passed the police budget, which includes 97 new officers, 92 new civilian hires, a new training centre, renovations to headquarters (didn’t we just do that?) and a bunch of toys like drones and an incident command post.

Mind you, that’s about one-fifth of the cost of the second armoured vehicle, what we in the public would call a tank, that police say they desperately need because of rampant crime and stuff.

I feel so much better knowing we will have two of them to rumble up and down our suburban streets. At least we’ll have a spare for the Santa Claus parade if the other one is tied up.

Since the police budget was passed, Chief Thai Truong added another deputy chief. But something is amiss. Three senior civilian staffers were fired in the spring and a long-time deputy chief and two other senior officers have taken medical leaves in recent months.

London is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. And as we go along, I expect there will many unfamiliar challenges and needs that the public institutions will have to address. If our community has gotten so unsafe, as the police say, they didn’t need to hire a private company to make a public case.

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The police got what they wanted. Meanwhile public transit, libraries and other city services have been forced to tighten their belts.

At the hospital, money spent on administrators could have gone to better patient care.

And at the school board, kids who might not ever get to go to a museum or play a sport or attend a concert have been deprived of some of those experiences so adults can do the seventh-inning stretch.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

jsims@postmedia.com

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