Part 1: The Role of Administration— Service Delivery
The role of administration is to:
Provide stable, effective, service delivery.
Advise council.
Implement council decisions.
Federal, provincial and municipal governments are responsible for different aspects of our life. This is what municipalities are responsible for:
Water and wastewater
Fire and police
Garbage
Land use planning and development
Public services like parks, recreation, transit, libraries and community services
Economic development
(Medicine Hat’s electric and natural gas public utilities aren’t traditional municipal services. I’ll talk about the proposed municipally controlled corporation, Saamis solar and other related issues in a subsequent article.)
Benchmarking
If you’re upset about the cost of some municipal service, do you know how our municipal peers rate? If you don’t, what are you basing your reaction on?
The standard we should judge service delivery against is not perfection, but our peers. The only fair way to measure administration’s performance is to benchmark ourselves against our peers. Without that information, we lack the context to judge.
A benchmark is an established point of reference against which things can be measured and compared. If we want to understand municipal service performance, we have to participate in municipal benchmarking initiatives.
10 cities, including Medicine Hat, joined together a decade ago to launch the Alberta Municipal Benchmarking Initiative.
You can read how Medicine Hat stacks up on Drinking Water, Fire Services, Waste Water, Solid Waste, Roadways Snow and Ice Clearing, and Transit. These are joint reports from the ten participating municipalities. Click here, scroll to the bottom.
This initiative hasn’t continued for a few reasons. It takes staff time and resources to collect this information and to work with staff from other municipalities to agree on benchmarks. Additionally, not all cities wanted to continue in this initiative because some don’t measure up well against their peers.
These reports from 2017 show Medicine Hat performed well against our peers on cost and performance. If we don't measure well, these initiatives help council and the public push for improvement. These initiatives also help staff by creating a community of professional peers, who they can get advice from. If Lethbridge or Red Deer is doing better on some measure, Medicine Hat staff can ask them how they do it.
One of my priorities is co-operation. This is one way co-operation improves municipal performance. Benchmarking initiatives should be a priority for us.
Current state of service delivery
Water and wastewater
No news is good news. I can’t recall any significant problem with our water supply. It’s easy to take drinking water from our taps for granted. We shouldn’t. I grew up in India. I know what the alternative looks like. I love drinking tap water. Medicine Hat’s tap water is amazing. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes complex systems and trained, dedicated staff built up over decades.
The distribution of clean drinking water is one of the most positive impacts of municipal governments. Hospitals, showers for ourselves and our children, food preparation—all depend on clean water.
Everybody Poops is a popular children’s book. Imagine how much poop 63,000 people create everyday. Transporting wastewater away from your house safely, then treating and disposing of human waste has always been a key challenge for cities.
So much of our health advances, like huge decreases in infant mortality, are tied to the safe supply of clean water and the disposition of human waste. Medicine Hat is as good as any city anywhere in the world for our water and wastewater systems.
This wastewater report from 2017 provides an example of the type of report we need to fairly judge performance.
This chart shows the total cost of collecting wastewater from residences and commercial/industrial customers, treatment of the wastewater to provincial standards, and processing biosolids separated from the wastewater stream for re-use.
Emergency services: Firefighters
The history of cities, with people and buildings packed closely together, is a history of fire. Every major city, prior to the development of firefighters and municipal water distribution, has a story of a devastating fire. (Our city just celebrated 125 years of fire service!)
A fire doubles in size every 30 seconds. The provincial standard for fire response time is 10 minutes.
Red Deer’s target is a 10 minute response.
Edmonton’s target is an 8 minute response.
Calgary’s is a 7 minute response, but 10 minutes for new neighourhoods, as they’ve struggled to meet this standard.
Medicine Hat’s target is 6 minutes and 20 seconds for 90% of calls. In 2023 they exceeded their target, arriving within 6 minutes and 6 seconds of calls for help. In 2024 it was 6 minutes and 15 seconds.
Medicine Hat’s firefighters response time is best in the province, best in Canada for a city of our size. I’d be surprised if you can find better. Do you know what it takes to execute such quick, consistent, fire response?
It’s a risky job. Despite higher building code standards, modern houses burn faster because of composite wood, vinyl and other synthetic materials. Despite higher workplace safety measures firefighters still have higher rates of cancer than the rest of us.
Emergency services: Police
I’ve been on a ride-along with Medicine Hat police. Police work harder and have a harder job than firefighters. There’s no question for me.
Each shift is one call after another. Each call is a high stress encounter. Welfare checks, violent acts, accidents. If a job is measured by the amount of harm a person can do, the difficulty of police work ranks extremely high. Police know every encounter can be scrutinized. The reputational risk each police member must carry on behalf of the police service is enormous.
Medicine Hat has a solid police service. Policing is increasingly controversial, because it’s increasingly difficult. That is due to wider societal pressures and not due to the performance of Medicine Hat’s police. We are increasingly putting them in difficult situations. We don’t always put police in a position to succeed.
Additional reading on police issues:
Modern Policing and the need for a social service first responder
Councillor McGrogan is running for mayor. His experience as Chief of Police speaks highly of his ability to work in a high stress job. Chief of Police and Mayor are the two highest profile, challenging jobs in the City.
Infrastructure
Medicine Hat’s asset management of our roads, water and wastewater lines, etc is above average. I spent the last two years working as a policy analyst for Alberta Municipalities. ABmunis is an organization made up of municipalities in Alberta. During my time working there I heard how every city is struggling with failing infrastructure. Remember the summer of 2024 when one of Calgary’s main water lines ruptured? Medicine Hat is also challenged by this issue, but the state of our infrastructure is above average, compared with other cities.
Medicine Hat aims to replace one percent of our infrastructure each year. Sounds like a little, but it’s not. Cities are always under construction. We should be thankful. Think of it like going in for preventative surgery. Sometimes you find things you didn’t know were wrong until you get under the skin. The alternative is waiting until your hips blowout. These minor inconveniences are what prevent things like Calgary’s water 2024 infrastructure calamity.
Economic development, Land use planning, and Public services (parks, recreation, transit, libraries and community services)
This good news doesn’t mean Medicine Hat is perfect. It’s also getting more expensive and harder to maintain these levels, but most cities would trade places with us.
The core services of infrastructure, water, wastewater and emergency services are the easy ones. Easy in the sense that the performance of these systems are easier to measure and benchmark.
Public services, land use planning, and economic development are no less important than our core services, but they do require a different approach. These municipal services are harder to deliver because there is a wider range of options and it’s less clear what the right answer is. It’s not surprising these are often contentious issues.
When outcomes are uncertain we need to acknowledge risks for any decision, which is a good segue into Part 2 and administration's next role—advising council.
References.
Alberta Municipal Benchmarking Initiative (These are joint reports from the ten participating municipalities.)
