Jennifer Smith

I don't generally do breakfast. Nor do I do early mornings - certainly not since I started working nights. Nevertheless, on Thursday morning I got up about three hours earlier than my accustomed time and headed out to the annual Mayor's Breakfast, presented by the Milton Chamber of Commerce.

It was quite the turnout. You'd think it was an election year or something.

The presentations were surprisingly interesting. They started with OLG (Ontario Lottery & Gaming) on their new partnership with Bullfrog Power, during which they announced that their IT centre and six of their casinos and slots centres - including the one at Mohawk - will now be 100% powered by green electricity. Well, the equivalent anyway. When companies and individuals pay Bullfrog for their electricity, that amount of low-impact renewable energy is injected into the grid from wind turbines and other renewable sources.

It's an innovative approach, and even though it's only one small step, I'm glad that OLG is making this move.



The Town's CAO Mario Belvedere then did a presentation on "The Business of Town Hall", in which he distilled the otherwise complex finances of the town's various departments and broke them down into their simplest form.

For example, Milton Hydro, which is run as an independent for-profit entity, took in revenues of 11.5 million last year and spent 9.4 million, with the difference paid as a dividend to the company's sole shareholder: the Town of Milton. Transit on the other hand is an important service that recoups only a small portion of its costs in fares, but that too was laid out in terms of cost vs. monies recouped through fares.

The whole presentation was like that, broken down department by department: sports facilities, parks, road maintenance, by-law enforcement, etc., with simple expenses and revenues for each. Money in, money out.

Belvedere should write a book: "Town Management for Dummies".

As I sat there soaking all this in and taking notes here and there, a couple of things struck me. One was that it would be nice to see all this information presented in just this form to everybody in town every year, not just a room full of business Brahmans.

The second was that Belvedere's underlying theme of "running the Town like a business" sounded awfully familiar. And then I remembered: that was Hazel McCallion's mantra.

As an underlying principle, of course, running a town like a business makes obvious sense. Money in, money out - how else would you run it? But putting the emphasis on the Town as a business avoids what may be a more important question: exactly what kind of business should a town be run like? A family store? A corporate shell? A non-profit organization? Should the focus be on providing services or on minimizing costs? And what is the appropriate balance?

I'll leave that one with you for now.