When you think about it, some of the challenges facing Saskatchewan rural municipalities are similar to the challenges facing agriculture as a whole.
Farming has become a science, requiring significant attention paid to managing water resources, fertilizers and chemicals, machinery, fuel, crop selection and rotation and seemingly infinite list of smaller details that won’t necessarily guarantee crop production, anyway.
And after all that, no money is made until your cereal, pulse or oilseed crops are properly marketed.
While it may be what producers wanted, there can be no doubt that it’s added to the complexity of today’s modern producer.
However, one big difference between today’s farmers and today’s RM is how the size of their respective operations have and haven’t changed.
For farmers, it’s all about learning how to manage more acres to allow their operations to remain viable.
But for reeves and rural municipal councillors, the size of RMs hasn’t changed because few RMs have gotten bigger through amalgamations in their 100-plus years of existence.
One might assume that would make the job of managing RMs less complicated.
Fewer farmers in each RM because of larger farms should mean less conflict between farmers over things like whose grid road gets gravelled or ploughed first.
But while some may still subscribe to the old cliché of RM administration being all about gravel and gopher poison, it’s gotten considerably more complicated than that.
Today’s RM reeves and councillors must deal with complicated environmental and drainage laws and regulations.
Moreover, larger scale farming operations are often the exact ones being blamed — fairly or unfairly — as the source of such newfound environmental and drainage problems. Keeping up with legislation and governance changes and arbitrating disputes is an increasingly complicated problem for today’s reeves and councillors.
But it’s getting even more complex then that.
For example, recent stories about the collapsed bridge in RM of Clayton or ammonia levels in the water in the hamlet of Lone Rock and the RM of Wilton speak to the added complexity
And it’s now always physically identifiable problems in play.
There have been an increasing number of cases of personnel related issues impacting rural governance involving today’s expected standards of conduct. In other words, bullying and harassment are very real things in today’s workplaces, as a few local RM councillors are now discovering.
Even if these incidents are isolated, they represent the added complexities facing today’s local politicians.
But this may be just the beginning when it comes to the changing face of some rural municipalities.
Consider what’s going in RM of McKillop that has been under supervision since September after Government Relations Minister Warren Kaeding appointed in September a supervisor to oversee massive administrative and democratic issues in the RM.
The reason for the need for supervision has to do with significant financial problems, culminating with a proposed 130-per-cent tax increase to deal with the problems.
There are clearly questionable spending decisions now under examination, but the issue boils down to the growth in cottage property, the need to properly service these property owners and the unwillingness of existing RM council to address the specific concerns of these newer ratepayers.
Cottage owners on Last Mountain Lake are mostly located in McKillop’s Division 4. The ratepayers say 54 per cent of the eligible voters are in Division 4, compared with four, four, six, 14 and 18 per cent of the voters in the other divisions, respectively.
Yet even after a 73-per-cent resolution vote in favour of changing the boundaries existing McKillop council chose to pass a resolution to hold public meetings on the matter.
Among the many new realities for municipalities is a rather old one. Every vote should count — especially in today’s rural municipalities where things are changing and challenges are mounting.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
