Critical linchpins need improving

Who-you-gonna-call when you want to find out something about your council or municipality or local services?

Residents can talk to a friend or neighbour, search a newspaper, or maybe brave a phone call to city hall. While those are options, more than likely you start by searching the municipal website.

These critical linchpins to all-things-municipal on the South Island vary from dismal to excellent. Councils must continually improve their websites – what effectively is an essential service – to better engage their residents.

For starters, residents want substance in press releases.

It seems the information on municipal websites is often for the sole purpose of getting council re-elected.

But most of us believe the content should be for the purpose of communicating with the public on everything relevant to residents. That would include news that may or may not reflect well on council or the administration.

A case in point is the hubbub a few weeks ago over the remuneration and expense policy for city council. The municipality has yet to release or post the factual outcome to inform residents – many residents were on summer holidays at the time – even though salary charges are the most significant in 15 years. There’s nary a word.

Secondly, not everyone speaks English.

It’s a welcome sign when you visit the Saanich website, you can click the language button at the top and view the contents in dozens of languages, even Latin. Visit the Victoria website and you can translate to Ukrainian and even Kiswahili.

But at the CRD, which provides services to 450,000 residents on the South Island, there’s no translation function on the website. In Langford, the third largest municipality on the South Island, it’s English only.
That’s inexcusable given it’s an easy and inexpensive technical fix to better reach a fast-growing and increasingly cosmopolitan population.

Thirdly, few of us have 20-20 vision.

In fact, findings from the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability indicate that 5.4% of Canadians aged 15 years and older report having a visual disability. As the population ages, it will only increase.

Most, but not all municipalities, welcome residents with a simple sizing function on their website. It allows everyone to alter content to make it larger and more readable.

The CRD, Sidney and Central Saanich, among other local governments, may want to consider adding this function for residents with a visual disability.

Fourthly, everyone has a right to know the remuneration of the mayor and council.
During the last several months, city council discovered the public gets very testy about remuneration and expense issues.

Critics have long recommended municipalities post a dedicated page on remuneration and expenses to inform the public and counter rumours.

Full transparency should include pay policy, expense policy, council financial disclosures, top-up pay from other local government sources, and so on. After all, taxpayers pay the salaries of the 100 local politicians in the region.

The CRD, Saanich, Colwood and others have had such a dedicated page for some years, and the sky hasn’t fallen yet.

It’s unreasonable for Victoria residents to have to rummage around the Open Data Portal and try to find policies and various other documents. To be frank, it’s a stunning omission that was readily available for years under the last city council.

With the recent remuneration and expense updates at Victoria, it’s an opportunity to make the change to help bolster transparency and trust.

Lastly, residents and businesses want understandable and easily accessible documents on local government finances.

Understanding them isn’t an easy task given the ever-increasing complexity of local budgets and increasing reporting requirements for municipalities.

The ordinary person is not an accountant or a banker and has limited financial acumen.

There are a few model municipalities – usually the larger jurisdictions – good at delivering information for audiences with varying degrees of interest.

In our view, if regional municipalities adopted these five measures, the first point of contact with many residents could be vastly improved.

A more service-focused approach that’s more sensitive to resident needs would pay off.

Who knows, it might even encourage disengaged people to show up at the voting booth next time around. Of the three largest South Island municipalities in 2022, Langford had the lowest voter turnout at 24%, followed by Saanich at 30.8% and Victoria at 36.8%, according to CivicInfoBC.

It would take minimal cost and effort to make municipal websites more user-friendly. There’s arguably no better way to promote community engagement, and foster more trust and respect for local government.

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