Is smaller better?
Tomorrow the county I live in is having a meeting about reducing the number of Supervisors that are elected. This talk is going on many places. Even in Canada.
According to the Ottawa Citizen …
OTTAWA — Seeking to tap into growing dissatisfaction with city government, mayoral candidate Jim Watson Sunday unveiled a plan to shrink council by up to a third, to improve governance and save taxpayers $2 million a year.
In a dramatic move, Watson said he wants the number of councillors reduced from 23 to between 14 and 17, and if elected, vows to fight to win council’s approval within his first six months in office.
“When you look at our council, compared with any other major city in Canada, we are top heavy in politicians. On a per capita basis, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Winnipeg all have fewer councillors,” Watson said.
“I just think you are going to have a more efficient council with fewer people and you are going to save money.”
The savings will come from councillors’ salaries and office budgets.
I don’t know if 23 Councillors is too many for Ottawa, but I have claimed for years that 29 Supervisors is too many for Barron County, Wisconsin.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 3:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Is smaller better?”
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Academy of Local Politics: The Local Government Pontificator Says:
September 10th, 2010 at 1:17 am
[...] I wrote a few days ago of a meeting to discuss reducing the number of members on governing boards. [...]
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August 24th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Oneida County is looking at studying a reduction in the number of supervisors, I hear. Interestingly enough, I also saw there was a study done by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance a couple years back that claims the result that fewer county supervisors actually correlates to more spending. Seems counter-intuitive, but apparently that’s the numbers. I have seen postulated that perhaps it has to do with supervisors being accountable to a smaller group, creating more intimate constituent relations. Huh.