Letter: Service model needs fixing

The City of Greater Sudbury is made up of a number of small towns and several distinct rural areas.

When these were rolled together to form the City of Greater Sudbury, it created a situation that the city has not been successful in servicing effectively.

Councils of the time — and still today — have not been able to recognize and structure the city to service anything other than city conditions. Because of this, and recognizing that the outside areas feel excluded except as a source of taxes, Community Action Networks (CANs) and a system of Healthy Community Initiative funding (HCI) were created.

Adding these functions instead of fixing the problem was a major mistake that continues to needlessly cost everyone millions of dollars per year. It has allowed councils to assume the problem was fixed when it wasn’t. The time consumed by council and staff in developing a mechanism for these has been largely wasted, and services to the outlying areas continue to suffer.

There is no reason that one administration can’t address the differences, but there has to be recognition that conditions and services suitable to a city are not suitable in rural areas or small towns. Services to those areas according to their needs are required.

An example is the HCI fund, where 75 per cent of the money is spent on capital assets that rightly belong in the appropriate department, and, in fact, are to be budgeted and administered by those departments.

The remaining 25 per cent is spent pandering to small special interest groups. While this splits $600,000 per year equally to the 12 Wards, it focuses on satisfying desires and does nothing to address the supply of services to the towns and rural sectors according to their needs.

If there are problems within departments towards doing so, then those problems need to be resolved by adjustments within the departments. Trying to compensate instead of correcting is a costly mistake that each Council has endorsed.

Wake up council. While we may be one city, we certainly can’t function efficiently or even adequately with one service.

Thomas Price
Whitefish