■ Focus on Core Responsibilities: Get back to the original purposes behind local government by pursuing disentanglement with other orders of government and funding top priorities first. Upload services that redistribute income or that produce negative spillovers.
■ Accurately Price Services: Expand user fees to more services, begin charging individuals the full marginal costs of services they consume rather than the average cost, pursue property tax reform as a long-term objective so that the taxes paid more closely reflect the costs of servicing properties, and explore tolls to help finance roads and bridges.
■ Competitive Service Delivery: Open municipal services to competition by allowing private and non-profit producers to compete with public producers to deliver municipal services in an effort to increase efficiency, improve services, and lower costs. Help public employees to formulate bids.
■ Public-Private Partnerships: Relax the strong commitment to subsidizing services through taxes and invite private participation in infrastructure development.
■ New Tax Tools: Substantially reduce property taxes and secure new taxing authority that provides better revenue-generating capacity, allows cities to recoup the costs of providing services to outsiders, and gives them the ability to capture a larger portion of the economic activity occurring in their boundaries.
The study provides valuable information on how western Canadians view some of these options. Generally speaking, westerners are somewhat wary of certain systemic reforms, and somewhat shy and skeptical of new approaches. To move the options forward, Canadians must become more aware of the close link between municipal infrastructure and their future prosperity, standard of living, and quality of life.