Futures ignores northern realities

June 12, 2002

Dear Mr. Hume:

I am writing to you with my concerns over MPAC’s restructuring process. It appears that this process was designed for the advantage of the Southern Ontario economy without any thought or analysis of the north and how it differs from the south.

The creation of the Call Centre and the Central Processing Facility will do nothing for the citizens of Northern Ontario. How do you suppose a taxpayer from Hornepayne is going to react when they have to phone the call centre in Toronto to talk about their new assessment notice when the person they are talking to has no clue about the market in Hornepayne or for that matter where it is? I’m sure what will end up happening is the call centre will not be able to help, and will end up forwarding the call to our local office anyway.

Even their future data collection and customer service methods are not going to work in the north. At present we are all what you would call “neighborhood assessors,” which means we are responsible for certain geographic areas and handle nearly all aspects of assessment for that area. What they have proposed is “functional assessors” which means there will be different assessors for each aspect of assessment for all municipalities covered by the regional office. Therefore it is very possible that we could have three or four different assessors making a two or three hour drive to the same municipality to do what one assessor used to do. As well I’m sure the northern municipalities would prefer to have one contact person for their region that they know personally and who is familiar with their realty market. This ideology may be viable in Southern Ontario, but I’m sure the taxpayers and municipalities of the north are not going to like it.

I feel the creation of the Central Processing Facility to handle all aspects of land transfers and mapping for the north is also a bad idea. They are counting and relying on a company that has a poor track record and inferior product to come up with a digital mapping version of the north. This would take years to accomplish, yet they have informed us that by the end of this year our mapping department will be eliminated. How is someone in Toronto going to issue a property severance and create a new roll number for a property, when their knowledge of that area is vacant? We use our existing maps to a great extent every day just to help us find our way around this large district. Many times this is all we have to help us. Word is they also want to get rid of our field books, which in the north is also not a step in the right direction. Sometimes when we are working in rural areas, the photographs in our field books are the only way to identify if we are inspecting the right property, and apparently the new handheld technology that is forthcoming has no parameters for sketches or photographs.

On Thursday, May 30 we received the staffing numbers for our office. We are being reduced from 29 to 15. Someone has to get the point across to MPAC that it is going to cost more to do assessments in the north and that the current staffing totals will not work. The Algoma District contains approximately 48,000 square miles of area, and takes eight hours in good traveling conditions to drive from one end to the other.

In 15 years I have never seen the morale in this workplace as low as it is now. We have many people who are good employees that have been taking courses to better themselves, that are now on the chopping block in order to satisfy the numbers someone at head office has determined. They did not consider how Northern Ontario is a completely different animal than the south, and that just because of geography alone it is going to cost more to maintain the assessment roll on a per property basis than the south.

I hope this will help you to understand what is happening to the assessment system in Northern Ontario of which you are an integral part, and wish that you and the other board members take an in-depth look into this restructuring process to try and lessen the damage caused by it, for the good of the employees, the municipalities and the taxpayers of Northern Ontario.

Sincerely,

Tim Wishman, Sault Ste. Marie

 

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