One more thing I LOVE is how Urban3 adds up all these price tags across the entire city and maps out the costs on a map. They call it a "Cost of Service analysis".
Imagine a municipal road infront of a few big box stores and adding up the costs for all City services on that stretch of road -- new benches, bus shelter repairs, pot holes, resurfacing, sidewalk snow clearing, winter road maintenance, street tree care & replacement, stormwater maintenance, etc.
However, urban3 then takes the revenues the big box stores in that same area contribute to the City's coffers. Both revenues and costs are displayed on the same map. You can then zoom in to see which areas of a particular neighbourhood are costing the most money and which are generating the most revenue.
Great idea! Some municipalities do have some good numbers which you can find through Municipal Benchmarking Network Canada. A great resource if you wanted to start pricing things in your neighbourhood(eg. cost of winter maintenance for a km of road). Unfortunately municipalities seem to pull out of participating in this initative when they start looking very bad and poorly managed compaired to other cities. Mayor Jim Watson had the City of Ottawa stop reporting this data shortly after 2015/16 citing that it was too expensive to measure all the benchmarks (but did not put a price tag on that expense so citizens could also asses if they too agreed the costs outweighed the benefits of national benchmarking). Example report prior to #ottcity leaving the network:
One more thing I LOVE is how Urban3 adds up all these price tags across the entire city and maps out the costs on a map. They call it a "Cost of Service analysis".
Imagine a municipal road infront of a few big box stores and adding up the costs for all City services on that stretch of road -- new benches, bus shelter repairs, pot holes, resurfacing, sidewalk snow clearing, winter road maintenance, street tree care & replacement, stormwater maintenance, etc.
However, urban3 then takes the revenues the big box stores in that same area contribute to the City's coffers. Both revenues and costs are displayed on the same map. You can then zoom in to see which areas of a particular neighbourhood are costing the most money and which are generating the most revenue.
https://www.urbanthree.com/services/cost-of-service-analysis/
Great idea! Some municipalities do have some good numbers which you can find through Municipal Benchmarking Network Canada. A great resource if you wanted to start pricing things in your neighbourhood(eg. cost of winter maintenance for a km of road). Unfortunately municipalities seem to pull out of participating in this initative when they start looking very bad and poorly managed compaired to other cities. Mayor Jim Watson had the City of Ottawa stop reporting this data shortly after 2015/16 citing that it was too expensive to measure all the benchmarks (but did not put a price tag on that expense so citizens could also asses if they too agreed the costs outweighed the benefits of national benchmarking). Example report prior to #ottcity leaving the network:
http://mbncanada.ca/app/uploads/2016/11/roads_2015.pdf