Town of Cobourg conducting municipal services review

The Town of Cobourg is calling on its residents to weigh-in on what services they use and don’t use and their perception of the level of service delivered.

An online survey is out to gauge the public’s feelings on just about all of the municipality’s services for review, with the exception of emergency services such as police and fire.

“Part of it is to get an idea of what services the community is using or whether they’re happy with the level of service. That’s what this is all about — the level of service delivered,” said Ian Davey, interim chief administrative officer. “We’re getting a good inventory of what the services are.”

According to the survey, residents are asked what the importance is of the Victoria Campground, parks and playgrounds, recreation programs, marina and waterfront facilities, arenas, and the Cobourg community centre, library and concert hall, to name a few.

The services are being broken down into whether they’re essential, mandatory, traditional or non-traditional services.

“It’s to highlight that to council. These are the services you are required, you have no choice but deliver.  But you get down into some of the other ones, they’re services you choose to deliver to have a complete municipality because the community wants or desires them,” Davey added.

The exercise is part of the province’s Municipal Modernization Program announced in 2019.

A total of 405 of the province’s smaller or rural municipalities have access to $125 million through 2022-23 to conduct new service delivery reviews or implement recommendations from previous reviews.

Some municipalities have discussed a reduction of the size of government, including councils, but Davey said that isn’t on the radar for Cobourg.

“What will come out of the report is a series of points for consideration that the consultant will highlight for council. These are areas that you may want to consider in terms for a reduction of service or an increase in service level. It will be up to council what points it wants to act on, if any, and the timeframe it wants to act on them,” he said.

“It may not be all in the next budget term. The purpose is to just lay out the options to council of things they want to consider going forward.”

While the review is going on during the coronavirus pandemic, Davey said the pandemic itself isn’t a factor in this activity.

When asked if the pandemic may skew how residents view services or the level of delivery while reductions and closures were going on, he said it may affect how residents may answer the questions.

“For the most part, other than the obvious ones like recreational programs that had to come to halt, the rest of them the municipality had to find different ways to deliver them,” he said.

“I don’t think COVID has really changed anything in the long-term. People may say, ‘We don’t like the levels of services because of the pandemic, we like the way it was before and we want them to continue, so don’t think about reducing the level in those areas.”

Davey said the survey closes at the end of September and the expectation is that council will have documentation from the review sometime in October.