Interesting would be a polite way of describing what once was budget time at my former local media outlet. A more accurate word would be ferocious.
Facing off against the publishers of the time was intimidating to say the least.
Everything was questioned; costs in place for years were arbitrarily challenged: “What’s this $25 for some weekly gardening column? Who cares about pansies?” would be typical of the challenge thrown across the table, where department heads, such as the editor-in-chief or ad director, would wonder why they hadn’t just remained a police reporter or a lower-rung salesman all those years ago.
It was brutal, but it ensured those spending the money knew where every penny was going and could fight tooth and nail in favour of such expenditures in the year ahead. Failure to do so meant some things would be deemed surplus to requirements.
This was, in its crudest form, what economists deem zero-based budgeting. Everything reverts to scratch, so before you even begin to ask for any addition to the budget you must, yet again, justify every dollar spent in the previous year and show why it is still required.
This does not happen in the public sector, something that came as a shock when I was put in charge of a similar-sized annual budget — about $5 million — during a somewhat ill-fated interlude working as one of the various vice-presidents within Alberta Health Services.
Whatever you’d spent in the current year was taken as given. Only in question were those extra things you wanted for the 12 months ahead.
This trip down memory lane does have a purpose. It helps explain why, at Calgary City Hall, the recent suggestion of limiting an increase in yearly household tax rates to 5.7 per cent instead of 7.8 per cent was described as a cut.
In the world of that former newspaper publisher, increasing spending by more than five per cent could never be called a cut. Try suggesting so and the first cut would probably be your job.
Canada was once deemed a country of two solitudes — the English and French populations that didn’t understand each other. Time has moved on, and for many reasons — the number of newcomers over the past half-century being primary — such a description is outdated
Nowadays, those solitudes are the private and public sectors. Neither understands the other and when an occasional individual moves from one group to the other it is akin to thinking and speaking in an entirely different language.
When success is judged by how much you can spend and how many people report to you, it makes perfect sense why an organization composed of those who have risen to the top by adhering to such metrics would have zero interest in revisiting a current budget to find savings to redeploy in the year ahead.
Doing so would earn nothing but disdain, if not outright hostility, from colleagues around you — if you do it, then maybe I’ll be expected to follow, being the statutory line of thought.
That’s why when you hear blather about how new technology, such as the burgeoning use of artificial intelligence, will result in efficiency and savings in areas such as public education, health care and civic administration, disregard such silliness.
Yes, AI will eventfully be introduced into the public service domain, after myriad tedious meetings no doubt, but it will come on top of what already exists. It will not replace.
Down at city hall or over at AHS, the equivalent of that questionable gardening columnist is safe forever. Hey, at least the pansies will rejoice.
Chris Nelson is a regular Herald columnist.
Nelson: Why council confuses rate hikes with cuts
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08.02.2024
Interesting would be a polite way of describing what once was budget time at my former local media outlet. A more accurate word would be ferocious.
Facing off against the publishers of the time was intimidating to say the least.
Everything was questioned; costs in place for years were arbitrarily challenged: “What’s this $25 for some weekly gardening column? Who cares about pansies?” would be typical of the challenge thrown across the table, where department heads, such as the editor-in-chief or ad director, would wonder why they hadn’t just remained a police reporter or a lower-rung salesman all those years ago.
It was brutal, but it ensured those spending the money knew where every penny was going and could fight tooth and nail in favour of such expenditures in the year ahead. Failure to do so meant some things would be deemed surplus to requirements.
This was, in its crudest........
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