By this time next year, the town of Sackville won’t exist as a legal entity, and a new, larger municipality will govern locally.
The province announced in December it will go ahead with plans to amalgamate Sackville, Dorchester and surrounding areas into a new municipal unit, despite protest from both Sackville and Dorchester councils. In December, Mayor Shawn Mesheau sent in a counter proposal to the department of local government, suggesting that it leave the town of Sackville as is and amalgamate Dorchester, Port Elgin, and surrounding areas into an even larger municipality. The proposal was developed at an in camera meeting of council, so the discussions were not recorded and remain outside public scrutiny.
In an email, department spokesperson Anne Mooers says her colleagues reviewed the Sackville proposal and “determined that the best way forward to benefit the area for the next generation was to bring the two local governments [Sackville and Dorchester] together.”
“We look forward to working through the transition with them and supporting them,” writes Mooers.
But just exactly what that transition will look like is still largely unknown outside Mooers’ department.
CHMA spoke to Sackville CAO Jamie Burke last week to find out what he knows so far about the process.
“It’s our understanding that the former local government reform team, who was largely responsible for guiding the process through 2021, will now transition into this transition team,” says Burke. In addition, Burke expects the province will hire facilitators with experience in municipal government issues, “and they will largely be responsible for the day to day decision making on behalf of the transitional team.”
Exactly how it works will be formalized and introduced to municipalities early in the year, Burke expects.
We do know some of the people who will be involved. Back in December, the province announced four people to lead the transition as advisers to the minister, two of them already working in the department of local government, deputy minister Ryan Donaghy and assistant deputy minister Jennifer Wilkins. Outside the department there’s Gerard Belliveau, the executive director of the Southeast Regional Service Commission, and Lise Ouellette, the former executive director of the Francophone Association of Municipalities of New Brunswick.
The department has also appointed two people (Ken Harding and Maurice Basque) to advise them on coming up with names for the new municipalities (as popular as it is on social media and t-shirts, ‘Entity 40’ is just a working title for the new Sackville-Dorchester amalgam.)
Burke is not yet sure whether the province will appoint a facilitator exclusively for ‘Entity 40’, or whether that person will also be responsible for other new municipalities at the same time.
Either way, Minister of Local Government Daniel Allain, through his transition team and advisors, will have near total decision-making powers related to the new municipalities throughout 2022, until new councils take over in January 2023.
“It’s very far-reaching and broad powers that the minister will have as part of this process,” says Burke. Allain will be able to make new or amend existing bylaws, create budgets, fix different tax rates, negotiate collective agreements, and “appoint, assign, retire, even terminate officers of the municipality,” says Burke.
JOBS, JOBS, JOBS
There are 40 people working for the town of Sackville, with one of those a temporary employee, and 12 in management positions, including Burke as the CAO. Over in Dorchester, there are four full time employees and two casual workers, with one of the full time employees being village CAO, Jennifer Borne. The local service districts that will be part of the new Entity 40 are managed directly by the department of local government, so don’t have any staff of their own.
There have been assurances from the province, says Burke, that “there will be a placement for everyone.” Because the new Entity 40 will incorporate parts of local service districts that have been managed directly by the province, it’s fair to say that the workload for a combined staff will go up, and require an increase in staffing, as opposed to cutbacks.
“Knowing the volume of work that we have now, and then looking at the additional area that the new entity will be responsible for, in my mind, there will be a need to increase staffing,” says Burke. “But it’s early days, and a lot will depend on the level of service expectations of the current LSDs.”
Burke is also not yet sure on how the transition will affect employees current positions. Will current managers and workers have to re-apply for their jobs? In some cases, it seems likely, as management jobs will likely change. But Burke says the town hasn’t yet received information on that process.
To complicate matters, the contract with CUPE Local 1188, representing town of Sackville workers, expired in December 2021, and a new contract is up for negotiation now. Whether that will be handled by the current management and council, left to the new one, or taken over by the provincial transition team is still unknown.
BY-LAWS
One major feature of a municipal entity is the ability to create by-laws. Both Sackville and Dorchester have their own by-laws, policies and procedures, and the new entity will have its own as well, eventually. The transition team will have the power to decide which by-laws are adopted by the new Entity 40, but it’s quite possible that they will choose to leave both sets in place, and leave it to the new council to start rationalizing them slowly over time.
“My gut feeling would be that there’ll be a transition period where we’ll have to live with potentially a variety of different bylaws,” says Burke. “And then, as the new entity kind of moves along, some of those bylaws could potentially be merged into one new by-law to cover the whole entity.”
FIRE SERVICES
Another wrinkle that may or may not get ironed out by the transition team is the management of the three separate fire departments that will be part of the new Entity 40. While the province has ruled out forcing the integration of fire services at a regional level, such as merging departments across the entire Southeast Regional Services Commission, it has not explained what will happen to fire departments in amalgamated entities, like number 40. Entity 40 has three distinct departments in Sackville, Dorchester and Point de Bute. The town of Sackville manages the Sackville Fire Department under the town’s budget, as does Dorchester under the village’s budget. The Point de Bute Fire Department has a budget managed by the department of local government.
“I’m just curious as you are,” says Burke, about the future of the departments and how their budgets will be managed. “It’s my understanding to date, at least, that the fire service will remain as is.”
“The future of the fire service will be dependent on the decisions of the new council,” says Burke. But in the meantime, what happens in 2022 is up in the air. “There’s lots of unanswered questions, and the fire service is definitely one of those areas.”
PLANNING
One major change with municipal reform across the province is that many more people will have access to representation, and also will be subject to land use planning. But that doesn’t mean Sackville zoning will suddenly apply everywhere, or Dorchester zoning, for that matter.
Burke told council on January 10 that, “even post-restructuring we would expect to have our own community plan like we do today.”
Sackville’s plan is due for a review, and work is being done now on the background study that would inform the plan review, says Burke. “Communities change from year to year, and we’ve certainly seen fundamental changes right here in Sackville with housing stock and housing options, not to mention population growth, and the health and wellbeing of the university.”
“There’s been lots of changes, and we certainly have lots of number crunching and statistical work to do before we’re in a position to advance any type of draft document for public consultation,” he says.
One of the changes the province has included in their reforms is the creation of provincial statements of interest to which all municipal plans will have to adhere. There’s no information on how the province will arrive at these statements, which will operate as a sort of value system for municipalities determining their zoning and land use by-laws.
The introduction of regional planning is also on the agenda. “That may go insofar as crossing entities even,” says Burke, possibly looking at the entire southeast region. “It will be much more a kind of planning from 10,000 feet, as opposed to community by community,” says Burke.
Regional planning presents the opportunity to put in watershed level protections, to establish greenbelts, and to reduce inter-community competition, things that can be beyond the reach of community level plans such as the one Sackville currently has. But the timeline in the province’s white paper indicates that the completion of regional planning is a ways off, slated for mid-2024.
Burke says he expects community consultation on Sackville’s municipal plan, but not until at least April or beyond.
TAXES
Taxation could be one of the most contentious issues in municipal reform, and is quite possibly the reason why successive governments have not managed to follow through on various reform proposals before now.
Tax rates have already been set for 2022, and Sackville and Dorchester rates are similar, with Sackville’s being slightly lower, even after Dorchester village council opted to lower theirs slightly for 2022.
Current tax rates, per $100 of assessment
- Town of Sackville: 1.56
- Village of Dorchester: 1.5701 (just reduced from 1.5895)
- Local Service Districts: 0.9875
There’s a much bigger difference when it comes to actual revenue collected. Quite simply, Sackville is wealthier in terms of property values than both Dorchester and the surrounding areas. Roughly speaking, the per capita tax base in Sackville is about $124,000. In the surrounding local service districts that number is about $76,000, according to figures in the province’s white paper. For the village of Dorchester, it’s about $56,000.
For the new Entity 40, the new average per capita tax base will be about $104,000.
“I guess this is one of the larger unknowns and concerns that we have,” says Burke. “Council has clearly voiced to the minister that we felt that it would be more advantageous for the financial piece of the restructuring efforts to be more known.”
Burke is happy with the town of Sackville’s financial position. The town has millions in a capital reserve, and has a policy of avoiding debt and spending on capital projects out of their annual operating budget.
“We’ve worked really hard to be able to do that, to put us in a position to undertake capital work without borrowing,” says Burke. “And we know what our tax rate is, and we know the process used to establish the tax rate so that we can continue to put ourselves in a good financial position.”
The amalgamation appears to throw that financial position into flux, as it’s not clear what services will be extended to the new Entity 40. Minister Allain has said, “people will pay for services they receive and they will not pay for the services they do not receive,” as a way to calm fears that higher town tax rates will suddenly be applied to rural properties.
But in addition to pressure on keeping tax rates low, there will likely be pressure on increased services, or at least equalized services, in the new municipality. And how services change, at least in the short term, will be decided by, you guessed it, the provincial transition team.
“Not knowing or having any type of understanding of what the future tax system will look like, and what those expectations from service delivery point of view may be, it’s really hard to crystal ball, to say what may or may not happen,” says Burke. But it does cause the CAO some uneasiness, he says, “to think what could happen if the expectation is to continue to deliver services at existing tax rates. We know that’s going to be problematic.”
Burke says he’ll be raising all of these various issues with the transition team as soon as he can. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve done an interview where I said “I don’t know” as many times as I have,” says Burke with an exasperated laugh. “We don’t know any more than what’s out there at the moment. We expect to hopefully know a little bit more in the days to come.”
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