On Thursday evening, Sackville’s municipal reform committee met for a third time, with a narrow mandate of providing input on whether Sackvillians would elect their future Entity 40 representatives at large, or in up to four separate wards.
But before they got to that question, councillors sounded off on a previous decision made by the province, to forego its own representation-by-population guidelines and allot just 50% of representatives to the former town of Sackville, which is home to 68% of the population of the new Entity 40.
Right off the bat, Councillor Allison Butcher asked Deputy Mayor Andrew Black if there was any chance of changing what she called “a skew as far as population goes?”
“No,” said Black. “That has been decided. That meeting that we had on the 15th, whatever decision was made at the end of that night with the advisory committee that was there, that decision was final.”
It’s become a theme of the municipal reform process so far: rushed decisions made in private meetings, with no substantive engagement with councils, much less the general public.
It was enough for Butcher to forego her usual attempts to put a positive spin on her comments: “At the risk of sounding really, really jaded, it probably doesn’t matter what I think should happen with the four councillors representing the 7000 people,” said Butcher, “because I’m starting to feel like it doesn’t matter what we think.”
Black told the committee that after a 1.5 hour meeting on February 15 with provincially appointed facilitator Chad Peters and the eight appointees to the provincial advisory committee, there was a consensus reached among all members, including himself and Mayor Shawn Mesheau. That decision meant erring on the side of underrepresentation for Sackville residents, in favour of over-representation for residents of the local service districts, who do not currently have elected councils.
“We did talk about population,” said Black. “There was a conversation back and forth about where the line should fall. But there was a recognition that within the new entity, to work together and have some sense of community within the new municipality, that there needed to be representation from the outlying areas that have not had it for a long, long time.“
Black said considerations like geography and sense of community figured into decisions on the number of wards needed in the communities surrounding Sackville. The two smallest wards, Midgic and Point de Bute, each have about 400 electors, compared to proposed Sackville wards which have between 970 and 1240 electors in each. Black explained that Midgic and Point de Bute were each allotted their own representative because they are separated by the Tantramar marsh, and Point de Bute has had an active LSD advisory committee.
Butcher was not the only councillor to express their displeasure with the decision by Black, Mesheau and the rest of Peters’ advisory committee. Bill Evans has been vocally opposed to cooperating with the province on a forced amalgamation, but commented that this recent decision made the situation even worse. “We are now being explicitly underrepresented in a fraudulent way,” said Evans. “It’s just appalling.”
“When you don’t have engagement and don’t have proper conversations around these topics, you get really shitty decisions,” said Councillor Sabine Dietz. “And that’s what this is.”
Dietz said that Sackville should not accept the decision. “Our role is to defend, currently, the assets, infrastructure and interests of the town itself, and they are definitely not being defended here,” she said.
There is a lot at stake in the representation on a new Entity 40 council, because one of their first orders of business will be to adjust tax rates. The province has indicated that it will not make any adjustments to tax rates in the 2023 budget that it has charged Chad Peters with creating. That means the new Entity 40 council will be left figure out how to reconcile revenues and expenses in its 2024 budget. Experts have identified tax rates as one of the most contentious aspects of municipal reform, and so it’s little wonder that the province has chosen to punt potential tax hikes down the road to newly elected councils.
Currently, residents of local service districts pay considerably lower tax rates compared to residents Sackville and Dorchester: 98.75 cents per $100 of assessment, compared to $1.56 per $100 of assessment within town boundaries, and $1.57 in Dorchester village. In addition, the average property assessment in the more rural LSDs is much lower than within town boundaries. This means that the bulk of Entity 40’s revenue will come from town residents, even while they have fewer council members representing them per capita.
Dietz also pointed out that a paragraph in the Local Government Act seems to indicate that any structure chosen by the province and Chad Peters will remain for at least four years. Councillor Matt Estabrooks pointed out the the Act allows councils to petition the Minister for changes within that time frame, but Dietz insisted the town should get a legal opinion on how much direct control the new Entity 40 council will have about its own structure.
“You have to think about it, who has actually got the say in the new municipality?” commented Dietz. “It’s not where most of the population is.”
“Why would LSDs give up the power to make decisions on the assets, infrastructure, projects and priorities of the new entity?” asked Dietz.
Despite Black repeating throughout the meeting that council distribution had been finalized, Dietz asked the Deputy Mayor and Mayor to go back to Peters and ask for changes. “I do think that you two should go back and ask that this be revised,” said Dietz.
At-large vote in a singe Sackville ward preferred among councillors
Councillors did eventually get to the topic of how the four Sackville councillors should be elected, with most favouring a single town ward with four councillors elected at large. Allison Butcher, Bill Evans, Sabine Dietz, Ken Hicks and Michael Tower all spoke in favour of an at-large vote, while Bruce Phinney and Matt Estabrooks supported dividing Sackville into the four wards proposed on the province’s map, saying that it would ensure representation from all parts of town.
Tower said he supported keeping Sackville at-large due to potential pitfalls of competing wards. “We’ve experienced before in town, when it was in wards, people will put their feet right in the mud and say, no, I’m not in favour of that. I’ll never support that, because you haven’t done this for my region. And as I’ve said before, if you look at all the things we’ve accomplished in this town since we’ve gone into our present at-large system, it’s all over the town, it’s not just one area. I think you’d be hard pressed to find where somebody is ignored.”
Others like Butcher and Hicks felt the at-large system was more straightforward, and would maintain some continuity with the town’s current system.
Acclamations, or no contest elections are also more likely in ward systems. (Read about more pros and cons of both systems here.) Currently, five of the eight councillors elected to Sackville town council live in one of the proposed Sackville wards (four of whom received the highest numbers of votes out of 12 council and two mayoral candidates), and so moving to a ward system would definitely cause a shake up.
Councillors also spoke about the curious way that some of the ward boundary lines were drawn, in particular those that carved off part of the town of Sackville and added it to a West Sackville-Rockport ward. In one case along Crossman Road, the proposed boundary line crosses the road to encompass a single house and then returns to the other side.
Councillors Michael Tower, Ken Hicks, and Sabine Dietz all questioned the decision to ignore the current town of Sackville boundary.
“I’d like to see you go back and say, can you stop mucking with our outer boundaries?” said Tower. “For people who are within the municipality, put those lines back up. Put the house back in.”
“It’s almost like gerrymandering,” said Tower. “You don’t play with figures, because we know that figures lie and liars can figure. So when you see those things happening, you’ve got to wonder, what the heck’s going on?”
Andrew Black said that he had asked Peters about the rationale behind splitting off parts of the town, and was told it has something to do with services such as sewer and water. He also said that unlike most other decisions already made by the province and advisory committee, exact boundaries were not yet set in stone.
Andrew Black and Shawn Mesheau will next meet with Chad Peters and the advisory committee on March 3, and the new deadline for finalizing boundaries is March 11.
