THE ISSUE
Some of you may have been following recent articles in both the
Regina Leader Post and the
Saskatoon Star Phoenix regarding the requirements for municipal
TRANSPARENCY. These two papers together conducted a study (
called "
Fees May Apply
"
) to determine whether Saskatchewan's 774 municipal governments were indeed making required information available to its taxpayers.
The results of their study will be of interest, to PARCS'
41 resort villages &
24 rural municipalities whose
cottage-owner citizens seek information from their municipal governments, as well as to the
cottage-owner citizens in the
50 organized hamlets who likely turn to their RM offices for information about budgets, elections, policies, bylaws and for the minutes from RM meetings - information that affect their lives as
cottage-owner citizens in an RM
.
In the fall of 2019, the Star Phoenix/Leader Post emailed every city, town, village, resort village and rural municipality in Saskatchewan asking them to forward these 5 documents: 1) their most recent
operating budget,
2) their
employee code of conduct,
3) their
council procedures bylaw,
4) their
council member code of ethics, and
5) their
council member public disclosure policy.
Only a little over half of Saskatchewan municipalities provided all or some of the information, either at no cost or at a reasonable cost. Many of the municipalities wanted hefty payments for the documents. Also, many municipalities
WERE UNABLE TO PROVIDE LINKS TO A WEBSITE CONTAINING THE INFORMATION.
In the Dec.24 edition, page A6, the Leader Post describes how their study revealed that "
local governments regularly ignore requests for public documents or charge exorbitant fees to fulfill them" and quotes the reaction from
Lori Carr, Minister of Government Relations, who stated that: "
the information that was requested of municipalities is all information that they need to be providing to us on an annual basis" and questioned why municipalities were unable to provide the information (or why some charged fees in excess of $100 and sometimes as high as $2,000 for providing information). Carr has proposed an on-line information province-wide portal for the future, where the public can find at least some of this information. She has also resisted any suggestions that having larger municipalities might alleviate the struggles that are faced by administrators of small villages or small RMs when faced with requests for such information.
PARCS works with administrators of some of the smallest municipalities in the province. In reflecting on this issue, PARCS Directors wondered if the public (in general) and the Minister (specifically) are aware of just how small is the staffing component of small resort villages, or just what might be the level of technological resources in these small resort villages. We decided to address some survey questions to the administrators of our 41 resort village in an attempt to determine the challenges that they may face in answering these public requests for information. PARCS hopes to summarize this information and share a summary of the input (with individual responses kept anonymous) both with our members, as well as with the Ministry of Government Relations. PARCS especially hopes, to paint a realistic picture of both the staffing resources and the technological resources of Saskatchewan resort villages.
NOTE - Although this newsletter is going out to everyone on our mailing list, the following SURVEY is addressed only to our
RESORT VILLAGE ADMINISTRATORS. Separate summaries of the data will be provided in a subsequent newsletter to all of our email contacts.
THE RESORT VILLAGE SURVEY
This survey is multiple choice: please click on
only one
"Select"
button for each question.
Please have this survey completed by
ONLY ONE STAFF PERSON -
preferably by the administrator or designate - whose answers will travel to Constant Contact where all the responses will be compiled and returned to PARCS. We would like to receive answers from
all
41 Resort Villages (both small and large).
We would like to paint a true picture of the administrative resources available to different sized resort villages - for sharing with the Minister of Government Relations!
Read and Click on only one "
SELECT"
for each question.
