Re: There's room to raise taxes, hire more staff in Olds, councillor says
In response to Olds councillor Darren Wilson and his idea Olds has room to raise taxes, I strongly disagree.
As a longtime resident and taxpayer in this town, I feel we aren’t getting value for our taxes.
The fact that some consultant feels the Town of Olds is lean in the operations department is ridiculous, with the white elephant, new large operations centre building they feel let’s add more staff – we have room for them.
There has been a void of management within the operations centre the last few years and by adding more staff, all that will be accomplished is spending more taxpayers’ money.
Some real leadership at management level would go a long way.
The council and administration needs to look outside the box. This town and community is loaded with private contractors. With private industry there is competition and many tasks would be done much cheaper by private contractors.
There are assets within the town that are very expensive for the town to have. The first example is a grader. The cost of having one and an operator cannot be justified. Over a year, how much is it even used?
Skid steers would be another example. And even owning a dump truck is questionable. The misuse of a $160,000 asset astounds me.
It was stated to me before that the life-long cost of adding one full-time staff member to the operations centre is in excess of a million dollars -- the wage, benefits and the pension that in the end, taxpayers pay for.
I have worked indirectly as a contractor for the Town of Olds for over 40 years and I feel the system is completely broken with Olds operations. It is like the Liberal government is running the show.
I might add that didn’t you want us to throw more money into O-NET a year ago, Mr. Wilson?
There is nothing sustainable about what the operations department is doing in Olds. As a taxpayer, we keep paying more but receive less.
Darcy Dobush,
Olds
