Nobody wants to pay higher fees. For anything.
So there will be some people who won’t be happy after Estevan city council gave first reading at its February meeting to the fees and services bylaw, a document that regulates how much will be paid for services provided by the city.
There are the obvious fees in the document, such as a pass to use the Estevan Leisure Centre, or the cost to rent a city facility like Affinity Place, the multipurpose room or even a playpark.
But then there are the less obvious ones, such as the cost for a city flag or a pin, or the cost to have the city perform a photocopying service.
Each of these has a cost, and each one needs to have some form of cost recovery. (We don’t know whether it will cost that much to make a City of Estevan flag, and frankly, we wonder if having a few more around town might indicate a little civic pride. But on the list of issues facing the city, the cost of a flag is pretty low).
And some of these costs are now in place to act as a deterrent. You might choose to eschew the internet and email in favour of going down to city hall to pick up a document, but don’t complain when it costs you money now.
It’s up to city council to find the balance between having a service at a cost-recovery level, and keeping it affordable to the general public.
Many of these fees have to go up every year. You have two options: keep the rates the same in perpetuity, or have the gradual increases to keep pace with the rising costs of labour and equipment and doing business.
If you keep them the status quo, then either you’ll risk eventually losing the service, or you’ll have to one day hit users with a larger and sudden increase that makes nobody happy.
It’s much better to have the monthly pass at the leisure centre go up in price every year, and to keep pace with the cost of doing business, than to have a large and unexpected increase once every five years.
And frankly, the way the city has been going about things in the past few years has been the right way. At one time, you’d get a rate review every few years. You’d find that the city had fallen behind other communities of a similar size for many rates, and those rates would go up considerably.
A few years ago, they created a document that established the rates for the subsequent years. If you bought a pass to the leisure centre, you would know what it will cost not only for that year, but you could find out what it will cost the following year, and the year after that.
Generally, it’s the right way to go. You might run into a situation that will force the city to have a larger increase than what was expected, but they have stayed very close to this document.
At this time in Estevan’s history, people obviously want to see increases of all kinds kept to a minimum. If the increase is too steep, it becomes a barrier to using the services and facilities provided by the city.
But we also have to remember that providing these services is not cheap. You have to pay the employees and keep the facility going. In the case of many services, you have to always keep purchasing new equipment.
So it’s understandable that the fees would be going up each year, bit by bit.
