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.
At Tuesday's Flin Flon School Board meeting, Trustee Glenn Smith made sure I had read through a report that portrays the board in a positive fiscal light. He did so a little bit in jest, making reference to a February editorial of mine that questioned why people are demanding city council cut expenses while seemingly giving the school board a pass. Fair is fair. As you read on today's front page, the report _ the product of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business _ compares funding and spending levels of all Manitoba school divisions. Flin Flon has the lowest spending increases in Manitoba over the last 11 years and among the lowest increases in property tax revenue over the last three years. The latter is the result of rising property values, not tax increases. And between 2010 and 2012, Flin Flon had the fifth-lowest increase in revenue from property taxes. It was the result not of a tax hike, but of rising home values. So yes, in several important categories the Flin Flon School Division is doing quite well in comparison to other Manitoba divisions. Trustees both past and present certainly deserve credit for that. Also deserving credit is the NDP government, which has pumped enormous sums of money into public education both locally and provincially. Unfortunately, one wonders whether this tenacious focus on education funding is coming, at least partially, at the expense of other priorities. Sure Flin Flon has well-funded schools and offers salaries generous enough to lure distinguished teaching talent. But we also have city council, stuck with costly provincial mandates, implying that the long-term future of some of our recreational facilities may be in question. Public education is important. But so too are the public facilities that council is struggling to maintain. Not as generous To put it mildly, the NDP has not been nearly as generous with municipalities as it has with school divisions. If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the cases of Lynn Lake Prawda. Lynn Lake, a fellow northern Manitoba town, recently voted to close its airport due to funding shortfalls. Mayor James Lindsay told CBC that means anyone in Lynn Lake needing emergency medical care will have to take a four-hour ambulance ride to Thompson _ on a rough road, no less. Meanwhile, in tiny Prawda, located in southeastern Manitoba, the local school remains open even though it has just seven full-time students. The NDP, you'll recall, decided a few years back to seize from school trustees the right to close a school, no matter how unfeasible the situation might be. So let me get this straight. When a town is forced to close its lifeline airport, it's not worth the province's time to intervene. But when a school's student body becomes the same size as the Huxtable family, the NDP has to get all dictatorish and command that it stay open? The province funds the lion's share of public schools. I'm not sure if Prawda's allotment, if transferred to the Lynn Lake, would be enough to sustain the airport or not. But what scares me the most is that I am 100 per cent certain such an idea has ever occurred to anyone within our provincial government. How's that for misplaced priorities? And what could it mean for the future of Flin Flon? Local Angle runs Fridays.
