Harry Jerome
The largest single item in the budget of most local governments is public safety: policing and fire protection. The City government is more concerned about protecting its turf than protecting its citizens.
POLICING:
Policing costs are mostly paying for the RCMP contract and then sharing costs of the building and equipment and support services with the District.
RCMP charges out the cost of the personnel assigned to the detachment and a portion of the costs of centralized services.
The cost of the RCMP used to be divided between the City and District by population. ie. 40/60 to the City and District respectively.
During the time I was on Council the RCMP switched to 'activity based costing'.. which meant more than 50% would go to the City.
All the City had to do was agree that North Vancouver was one community for the purposes of policing, and it would have avoided the additional cost.
As it happened, they insisted on a separate contract and City taxpayers pay roughly $2 million per year more than they would had the costs been split on a per capita basis.
FIRE DEPARTMENTS (yes, there are two of them):
The City probably pays less than it should for fire protection, but its insistence on maintaining its own one-hall fire department is putting its citizens at risk unnecessarily. (More to come… )
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