I’ve been reporting recently on the City of Brantford’s attempts to move into its 2013 budget with a “Budget 101″ approach.

This comes out of the mayor’s taxpayers’ bill of rights and the so-called intelligent service delivery review. Both ideas, despite how critics and skeptics may view them as more hot air or a distraction, are worthy of attention.

The city if hoping to lead its ratepayers through a series of conversations about what services if offers, how those services are funded and run. At a critical point in that conversation, people will be asked to tell the city what services they want to pay for and which ones they would rather see the city get out of entirely.

The importance of broad public participation in this process cannot be overemphasized. Come budget time, the typical engagement with the broader public usually falls into one of the following categories:

1. My taxes are too high.
2. Why am I paying for things I never use?
3. Why are you cutting a service that I rely on?
4. Can I please have some money?

In the reality of stagnant or next-to-zero growth in taxable assessment and ever-rising costs, this conversation is a needed one. As city treasurer Catherine Brubacher rightly pointed out at a recent meeting, the days of trimming percentages off of every department and business unit’s budgets must come to an end. Having trimmed $5.6 million out of budgets in this fashion over the past five years, there is little left to find using this method.

As of the 2012 budget, council and the city have also depleted all discretionary reserve funds— those pots of money the city keeps for discretionary use are not to be confused with the reserve funds that are mandated by city policy or provincial legislation and regulation (see: Development-charge reserve funds).

If significant savings are going to be found, an all-out discussion in the city needs to take place asking what services must continue (by mandate), which should continue because they’re valued and which should be cut. This can include a conversation on whether any and all of the above could continue but with a drastic change in the level of service.

I have my own thoughts on this based on what I’ve learned elsewhere and as opportunity allows I’ll share them in this space or in print/web through my Wellington Square column.

For those who keep coming back to the barricades over the unsustainable nature of municipal budgeting and taxation, you need to participate in this process. If you don’t, then you really have no one else to blame but yourselves.

As I’m working this weekend and is the practice here, I was off March 30 on a lieu day tending to other matters so otherwise unaware a building I’ve spent some time writing about lately was going up in flames.

Though I’m not a structural engineer, from a few drivebys Saturday, it appears the larger, three-storey office building on the western side of the two-building complex is a write off. However, it appears the “Timekeepers” building may not have suffered as much fire damage and may still be salvageable. The unknown with Timekeepers is the water damage from everything that was poured onto the other buildings to extinguish the flames.

We already know the two buildings needed to be re-roofed and this was one of the temporary measures recommended to preserve the buildings for a period of about three years until they could be adaptively re-used.

Some questions that I raise at this point— Where was security? The city has a contract (at least for the Greenwich side) for 24-hour security on this land. I don’t know if that’s people around the clock, surveillance or a combination, but obviously not enough for this.

The fire may put an end to all that.

In the social-media world, the heritage advocates are already slamming how indecision over the buildings’ future left them in the state where they were prone to what happened Friday. Mayor Chris Friel was quoted in Friday’s coverage angry over the recent indecision to move forward.

As I’ve stated here before, nothing done — more more succinctly “not done” — in the past year is exclusively to blame. These buildings sat vacant and unused for decades as they slowly deteriorated. Everybody — including the very heritage advocates who might have been yelling for their preservation — let them deteriorate. Nobody was willing to cough up the coin needed to preserve and reuse these buildings.

So while the fire may appease those looking for change in that quadrant of the city, it won’t be cheaper. Now Brantford has been forced to undertake claenup, remediation and demolition at the costs necessary. Taking those costs into consideration, an investigation into cause and suspects might be quite worthwhile.

The discussion at Monday’s operations and administration committee meeting on curbside organics, taken together with some earlier discussions, just shows how woefully in disarray the city’s waste-management programs may be.

For starters, and this completely boggles my mind, the city has a five-bag limit on curbside trash. That’s just lazy and the city should move towards bringing that to a more 21st century level. Growth of its waste-diversion programs, such as recycling and organics, is only strengthened when you enforce a stricter bag limit. As an earlier discussion at the council table showed, recent bag counts show very few people are even using the five bags they’re allowed to use today.

Curbside organics collection is a piece of the waste-diversion puzzle. It’s been done elsewhere for some time — in many cases quite poorly (see: Guelph’s first curbside organics program) but over time in some cases quite well. It comes at a cost, and not a recoverable cost in most cases since the city would have to be composting the organics itself to see the benefits from the residual value of what was collected. The choice to contract out is a better one, given the stink that gets raised, in any sense you might interpret it, over the location of organics processing and composting facilities. There is capacity at existing facilities in the region today, so the city can opt in to that model.

But if it’s not done in concert with stricter limits on bags and a better recycling program, what incentive does the average person not already motivated by doing good for the environment have to participate? Then, as some at the council table fretted Monday, you really are spending almost $1 million a year to extend the life of the landfill by a dozen years— 60 years from now.

Another option that can work for encouraging waste diversion? Move to a full cost recovery user-fee system (fancy talk for garbage bag tags). It’s political suicide, but then people will know, exactly, the cost of collecting and landfilling the garbage they produce. My current home has this system (though it’s not full-cost recovery)— as the bachelor with a cat, I set out my 25L garbage can about once every two months at $1.50 a turn. If there were to be curbside organics in Oxford, I’d set out that trash can about once every four or five months. This too can be fraught with peril— after all, that truck still drives down my street every week regardless of whether I’ve paid my $1.50 and put out my garbage can. But a forward-thinking plan can buffer this— as trash volumes drop, collection frequency can be adjusted to match.

Hopefully some combination of the above comes together soon— I can’t see it from where I’m sitting and dealing with these things as one-offs somewhat but not wholly connected to each other is concerning.

The battle lines are drawn. As council received the Greenwich-Mohawk brownfield reports Monday night the heritage advocates were on twitter, full force.

I should have held back, but it was too tempting to call one of them on how she was arguing her case. See the storify to see the evolution and devolution of that particular exchange.

This goes back to a thought I had when the draft documents were posted early in the year. It’s tragic these buildings were allowed to deteriorate to this extent. While adaptive reuse would be a great way to preserve some of this history, every other municipality that faced buildings of the same era got moving on these decisions over a decade ago.

Brantford is only seriously doing so now.

I’d argue save and except the two former Cockshutt buildings on Mohawk Street, the others are too far gone to merit the millions needed to do nothing more than preserve facades. They should be demolished — with all the appropriate heritage elements kept for reuse on the interior and exterior — and then the site cleaned to whatever standard council decides is acceptable.

Incessant arguments over the heritage value of the site and its role in this country’s industrial history are redundant at this point and moot. We know the history. We know the value of recognizing that history. After decades of neglect however, it’s unfair to burden those here today and tomorrow with the mantra of “we must preserve at any cost for preservation’s sake” being espoused by some.