On June 1, 2006 the forces of the city government descended upon “Compassion Park” in force to serve notice to the homeless camping there that the pointless game of tag, previously waged by the City, was about to begin again in 48 hours. Once again the taxpayers dollars are to be wasted in chasing the homeless around the city, as opposed to investing these funds in actually addressing the issues and causes of homelessness, the city government choosing to waste dollars in behaviour that accomplishes nothing. They might just as well build a bonfire in front of City Hall and shovel a pile of taxpayer dollars into it. As a demonstration of their commitment to wasting the taxpayers hard earned dollars, they dispatched a department manager, bylaw officers and police officers to deliver this notice. I am sure they could come up with some excuse for this wasteful overkill, but the fact is that all that was needed to deliver the notice was 1 person. Makes me wonder in just how many other ways the city is squandering money.

But then anyone who talks to management in that Tower of Babel called City Hall soon realizes that the people responsible for planning, budgeting and spending their money have no real sense of economic reality. This is probably why they are so over-paid, as they require exorbitant salaries to offset their total lack of economic sense. I had the displeasure of witnessing this total lack of any basic understanding of reality in a discussion with one of the city’s department managers. He stated that there was no money available to act as seed money for undertaking the complex task of beginning to deal with homelessness. When asked if some of the money that would be saved by not pointlessly chasing the homeless around the city could not be used in order to actually accomplish something, it was stated that there would be no such savings. I cannot remember all of the convoluted argument the minions of the city used, but apparently a dollar saved by not being stupid is not a dollar available to be spent intelligently.

The police spend countless hours chasing, harassing and generally dealing with the homeless. All these hours add up into hundreds of thousands (a million+?) of dollars in salary. So much so that the police needed millions of more dollars (driving the tax increases into the stratosphere) in order to meet other policing needs in the community. This argument also applies to the all the salary dollars of city employees engaged in the fruitless pursuit of the homeless, more thousands or hundreds of thousand dollars. From my business/economic point of view, if you do not spend all those dollars in a wasteful pursuit of the homeless, then you have saved those dollars. True, the city may decide that the money should be spent in other ways rather than in reducing the city taxes, but they owe it to the taxpayers to clearly state what they will be spending this money on so that the taxpayers can evaluate this spending – otherwise what is the point of bothering with a budget? So it would appear to me that if the city adopted a sensible approach to the issues of homelessness and poverty, stopped wasting all those taxpayer dollars, there would be several hundred thousands of dollars available every year to help fund facilities and services to address these issues. Not to mention that a portion of these savings would also provide the ability to either address other pressing needs or some tax relief.

No, I do not think that the city should or could be solely responsible for providing funding to address these types of social problems. However, using money saved by adopting intelligent behaviour as seed money to provide leadership in this crucial area seems sensible to me, if not to the politicians and bureaucrats of City Hall. Of course sensible action on the question of the homeless seems to be somewhat lacking at this time.