Examining Essential Services

Reducing the cost of service delivery when it comes to essential services like Protective Services will be challenging. However, given the magnitude of their contribution to the problem they cannot be ignored. In fact Council would be hard pressed to address the problem without dealing with this obvious cost driver as shown in figures 5 and 6.

There is no question that Protective Services are essential. The cost of Fire and Police is analogous to insurance.  We simply can’t risk the consequences that could result without either of these essential services. However, the cost of these services along with their rate of growth does need to be addressed.  For example some questions that need to be asked about Fire Services are:

a.    Is the magnitude of Owen Sound Fire Services consistent with those being provided in similarly sized municipalities? and,

b.    Is the Fire Services Model of all full-time employees, the most appropriate model for Owen Sound at this time?  Or, is an alternate hybrid model using a mixture of volunteer and full time employees something that can be implemented with an acceptable level of risk.

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