The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Flin Flon City Council's quest to change how Manitoba municipalities fund police protection is hardly a new battle. Communities currently pay for RCMP services based on which population category they fall into. A difference of just a few people can raise or drop the price tag by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This past November, city council convinced the Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM), an influential lobbying group, to push for a per-capita funding model for the RCMP. The goal is to address rising police costs, which were also a top-of-mind concern for the council of the mid-2000s. In 2004, Flin Flon joined a small coalition of Manitoba communities that called on the province to help deal with their RCMP expenses. 'We feel there is some place for the province to play a bigger role in this,' then-municipal administrator Larry Fancy said at the time. The coalition consisted of Flin Flon, The Pas, Thompson, Dauphin, Portage la Prairie, Selkirk and Steinbach. Nearly a decade later, police costs remain a source of dismay. Flin Flon's current RCMP tab amounts to $1.2 million a year. At the AMM's recent convention in Winnipeg, member communities adopted council's resolution calling for a system that has municipalities pay on a per-capita basis. No specific figures were mentioned. 'Artificial' The resolution says the current funding model 'is based on artificial population thresholds, and leads to some municipalities paying too much, relative to their population, for policing services, while others pay too little.' Yet the long-term implications of any changes to the funding system are, as far as Flin Flon is concerned, unclear. If Flin Flon's population remains above 5,000, it is possible a per-capita system would save the city money. But if the current system remains in place and Flin Flon slips to below 5,000 people, Mayor George Fontaine estimates policing costs would likely go down much further, by 80 per cent. Even if the province does not adopt a per-capita system, the mayor said he hopes the AMM resolution will at least prompt the province to reevaluate the funding model. Mayor Fontaine said he and council were disappointed in 2012 when they were given a new RCMP contract to sign even though they had no involvement in the negotiations between the Mounties and the province.
