MF YYC Politics - there, I mega did it

[bizaro86]

I mean, there are definitely things that could be cut. One that really annoyed me this year was we had a super warm fall so the snow clearing budget didn't all get spent. Someone from the city gave an interview saying this is great, we can spend the extra funds on extra street sweeping and other stuff.

Edited to add:according to the City's manager of mobility maintenance they were at their cap for contributing funds to reserves for future years. https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/calgar...08709.amp.html

[jammies]

Lots of simple, obvious, and wrong solutions here. Tighten the belts, cut the fat, do more with less - the trifecta of simple solutions that appeal to those who mistakenly believe metaphors trump reality.

[Slava]

I can see those trite comments as not being helpful. But the fact of the matter is that there were several motions with actual places for the city to save money in the budget when there were deliberations this past fall. I think at least two councillors characterized portions of spending in this budget as wants rather needs. So, while you guys want to contend thst there are no options to reduce spending that doesn’t seem to be the case.

[Wormius]

I don’t know if you’re referring to this, but how much work do you want city councillors and their staff to do to save you $4 a month?

Yeah, I get the “every penny counts” crap really plays to some fiscal wing-nuts, but I think we need to be serious people. Unless there’s something that can save half my property tax bill and not adversely effect my day to day life, this is just theatrics by councillors who have accomplished nothing of value during their terms.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10244440/...rebate-debate/

[powderjunkie]

If we accept for a moment that there is such a thing as an optimum sweet spot in terms of bang for your public buck (which is of course highly subjective), I look at it like this:

1. Spending above this sweet spot = diminishing returns on additional service, but a good chunk of this 'extra' money ends up recirculated in the local economy. Also some invisible 'savings' like better retention, meaning lower hiring/training costs.

2. Spending below this sweet spot = reduced service + additional indirect costs or service reductions through reduced retention and employee morale. This won't happen overnight, but you are guaranteed to lose some portion of your highest quality staff & mgmt this way, which further amplifies service loss.

Of course there is a limit to all of this, but I'll always lean to option #1.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Wormius

I don’t know if you’re referring to this, but how much work do you want city councillors and their staff to do to save you $4 a month?

Yeah, I get the “every penny counts” crap really plays to some fiscal wing-nuts, but I think we need to be serious people. Unless there’s something that can save half my property tax bill and not adversely effect my day to day life, this is just theatrics by councillors who have accomplished nothing of value during their terms.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10244440/...rebate-debate/

I was talking about the deliberations in November. But, if you think the bar is half your tax bill, it’s not happening.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Slava

I was talking about the deliberations in November. But, if you think the bar is half your tax bill, it’s not happening.

What is your bar? How much would you need your property taxes to go down to consider it a win?

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Wormius

I don’t know if you’re referring to this, but how much work do you want city councillors and their staff to do to save you $4 a month?

Yeah, I get the “every penny counts” crap really plays to some fiscal wing-nuts, but I think we need to be serious people. Unless there’s something that can save half my property tax bill and not adversely effect my day to day life, this is just theatrics by councillors who have accomplished nothing of value during their terms.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10244440/...rebate-debate/

I think the better question is how much time do I want the councillors to spend to find money in the existing budget to build an overpass, a peace bridge or more bike lanes. Taxation is a scarace resource whatever we waste in opex comes at the expense of other opportunities.

In my opinion they should increase taxes by .5% too much every year but in the 5th year you have 2.5% cost reductions throughout the city. I think a feature of the private sector is downturns where certain work just doesn’t get done anymore because it can’t be funded. This reset button is important. We need a means of simulating in municipal politics.

I think the activities that Nenshi did his first two years need to be a continuous improvement process to always be lowering the cost per capita after inflation of base services.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by curves2000

My brother works for the city, the level of waste in his department is downright shocking, sometimes what goes on and the lack of control is nauseating.

The city has over 10,000 employees. I doubt one person's experience encapulates the entire organization.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

The city has over 10,000 employees. I doubt one person's experience encapulates the entire organization.

That's fair. But there are plenty of folks in this thread saying there's nothing we could cut.

And there isn't a line item in the budget labeled "waste", so identifying things that didn't need to be done would be work. But there are absolutely things the city spends money on that it doesn't need to.

The street I live on got graded today. It's already mostly down to bare pavement from the weather, so this accomplished absolutely nothing. It would have been better to pay that employee his/her full wage and not pay for fuel/maintenance on a huge vehicle.

But there's a post-snowfall schedule so we follow that, instead of critically thinking that it's 10 degrees maybe we don't need to scrape bare roads.

[jammies]

Any large organization will have inefficiencies and waste. It is inevitable because organizations have to employ people, and people will find a way to extract the maximum value from their minimum effort inside any system that other people can devise.

Making policies and procedures handle edge cases and exploits makes the systems more complex, and complexity adds inefficiency. This is how bureaucracies develop seemingly interminable and unnecessary red tape, and why reforming processes to get rid of such complexity often leads to unintended consequences that may be worse than leaving the red tape in place.

For example, let's say that the city department in charge of grading the roads no longer grades according to a schedule, but rather someone has to go out and decide which roads need to be graded. Instead of the inefficiency of grading roads that don't need it, now you have the inefficiency of grader crews waiting on someone's word to go ahead. Or maybe you let the grader crews make their own decisions, and some crews will decide to leave roads untouched that need grading, then citizens call in to complain, and now you have to send out another grader, which is a different kind of waste. No matter what system you implement, entropy and friction always win.

This isn't to say that some organizations aren't more efficient than others. However, if you're going to complain about a particular organization, you should have more than a cursory understanding of how that organization compares to similar organizations of the same size, and what systemic changes would improve it - not just populist platitudes and contextless anecdotes.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by jammies

Any large organization will have inefficiencies and waste. It is inevitable because organizations have to employ people, and people will find a way to extract the maximum value from their minimum effort inside any system that other people can devise.

Making policies and procedures handle edge cases and exploits makes the systems more complex, and complexity adds inefficiency. This is how bureaucracies develop seemingly interminable and unnecessary red tape, and why reforming processes to get rid of such complexity often leads to unintended consequences that may be worse than leaving the red tape in place.

For example, let's say that the city department in charge of grading the roads no longer grades according to a schedule, but rather someone has to go out and decide which roads need to be graded. Instead of the inefficiency of grading roads that don't need it, now you have the inefficiency of grader crews waiting on someone's word to go ahead. Or maybe you let the grader crews make their own decisions, and some crews will decide to leave roads untouched that need grading, then citizens call in to complain, and now you have to send out another grader, which is a different kind of waste. No matter what system you implement, entropy and friction always win.

This isn't to say that some organizations aren't more efficient than others. However, if you're going to complain about a particular organization, you should have more than a cursory understanding of how that organization compares to similar organizations of the same size, and what systemic changes would improve it - not just populist platitudes and contextless anecdotes.

If you treat your employees like they're thieves then they will try and steal from you. If the grader driver was empowered to say "this road doesn't need grading" and then not grade it, we could save the money.

If you have someone saying that all the time to get out of work the 311 complaints you mention will make it obvious that they're doing so. The next couple times send a supervisor out to check and fire them for lying.

Keep the good/trustworthy employees and treat them well.

And really it's more about attitude. Under Nenshi (especially at the beginning) the city had an attitude of continuous improvement, where there was thought getting put into doing things a little bit better every year. Under the current mayor/council I don't think that same attitude/competence is in evidence.

[GGG]

I think there is a challenge in creating roles that are filled by people vs people who fill roles they are good at. In a small organization you can custom fit people into the needed skill sets so making that day to day decision on what road needs plowing works. When that needs to be done by 100 people to roughly the same standard that individual distributed decision making becomes much more difficult to implement. Your quality of person in the role has to drop and you can’t match the role to the skill set. Things become so much less flexible as organizations get bigger.

One might say you need to push down and allow distributed decision making. The challange becomes managing risk in the absence of clear rules.


I think military’s would be an interesting look at good distributed decision making models but then you look at the ratio of training hours to duty hours to get to the point you are good at it and it might not be efficient.

[timun]

Hold up.


GGG, do you think that militaries are in any way even a modicum of "efficient"...?

[GGG]

Originally Posted by timun

Hold up.


GGG, do you think that militaries are in any way even a modicum of "efficient"...?

In battlefield decision making to have a distributed group of people independently making tactical decisions while higher levels make strategic decisions all occurring in real time. Yes.

In administration and project planning? No. But they aren’t incentivized to be good at that stuff.

[Wormius]

In any event, are you going to pay a guy to first scope out which roads need to be graded or just pay him to grade the roads on his route that day?

[Slava]

Well, I can’t believe that it’s happened, but I agree with Dan McLean.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/co...-gondek-allies

[CliffFletcher]

How much discretion should we expect from municipal employees?

The stretch of sidewalk in front of our house has a dip that collects melting snow and then freezes. And our house is two-story with a north facing front and a steep lawn, which makes the pooling and freezing worse. It’s a problem.

This problem affects our neighbours on either side as well, though to a lesser degree. Last spring, one of them had an icy sidewalk complaint made against them, so they called in the City to look at it. In the summer a crew came and mud-jacked their stretch of sidewalk and boulevard, and then did the neighbours on the other side of us too. They did not do ours.

Now, because that’s how physics works, the dip in our sidewalk is even worse. It’s basically a pool of water that never dries, and freezes every night. I have to put sand down routinely to keep it from being treacherous (we’re on a busy street with lots of pedestrian traffic).

One might think that whoever authorizes City mud-jacking jobs would give some thought as to how this landscaping will affect neighhbouring properties. Because of physics and gravity and all that stuff. But evidently this is not the case. They only do the one specific thing they’ve been asked, with no thought to what problems this might create.

So yeah, count me in the ‘maybe City employees could exercise somewhat more judgment and discretion’ camp. We’re going to have to call them in again, they’ll have to prep and tag our property again, and then send another mud-jacking crew out again. When it could have all been done at once last summer.

[Canadianman]

Originally Posted by Slava

Well, I can’t believe that it’s happened, but I agree with Dan McLean.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/co...-gondek-allies

100% agree. Such a poorly thought out bylaw.

[Wormius]

Rick Bell’s famous logic.

“This bylaw is a dumb thing!”

“YYCCC has to stop devoting time and energy on dumb things!“

“YYCCC must devote all of its efforts right now to this dumb thing now!”