Efficiency
Efficiency here is what a unit of service costs to deliver: a road kilometre means the same thing in four municipalities, where a dollar per resident does not. 4 of the 6 ratios are scored; 2 are held back, because their units are counted differently in each township. Each municipality files on its own conventions, and Minden Hills has not filed for 2024, so most of this is drawn in 2023. Nothing here ranks councils.
Overall
- Highlands East0.79
- Minden Hills0.75
- Dysart et al0.29
- Algonquin Highlands0.17
- Highlands East
- 0.58 cost per unit · 1.00 per person
- Minden Hills
- 0.83 cost per unit · 0.67 per person
- Dysart et al
- 0.25 cost per unit · 0.33 per person
- Algonquin Highlands
- 0.33 cost per unit · 0.00 per person
A simple summary. The two halves below, averaged equally: what a unit of service costs to deliver, and what the municipality spends per person served. The detail is beneath, and it is where the argument is. Half of this has an agreed direction and half does not. Averaging them assumes that spending less per person is better, which this atlas does not otherwise claim, and which the second half of the page takes apart at length.
What a unit of service costs
This is the half that can be scored honestly, because of how the question is put. Spending per resident only measures spending. A council that spends little may be efficient, or may be deferring a road that costs the next council more. What a kilometre costs to plough is a different question, and there cheaper really is better.
It also settles the argument the rest of this atlas keeps having. A figure divided by a kilometre needs no population, so which of three populations to use does not arise.
What it cannot tell you is whether the kilometre was ploughed to the same standard. Cheaper per unit is more efficient only if the unit is the same, and nothing in these filings establishes that. Read this as half of efficiency, and the half that is measurable.
Across the 4 measures below
- Minden Hills0.83
- Highlands East0.58
- Algonquin Highlands0.33
- Dysart et al0.25
One point for the cheapest of the four on a measure, zero for the dearest, averaged. Four measures is not many, and one of them moving moves the average a quarter of the way.
The measures
Bridge and culvert spending per m² of deck · 2023
finance.expenses.bridges_culverts divided by roads.bridge_deck_area_m2, in the latest year both are filed by all four municipalities.
- Minden Hills$31.05 / m²
- Algonquin Highlands$61.48 / m²
- Highlands East$146.57 / m²
- Dysart et al$313.73 / m²
Disposal spending per tonne disposed · 2021
finance.expenses.solid_waste_disposal divided by waste.disposed_tonnes, in the latest year both are filed by all four municipalities.
- Minden Hills$294.96 / tonne
- Algonquin Highlands$397.73 / tonne
- Dysart et al$675.53 / tonne
- Highlands East$1,192 / tonne
Diversion spending per tonne diverted · 2021
finance.expenses.waste_diversion divided by waste.diverted_tonnes, in the latest year both are filed by all four municipalities.
- Highlands East$145.96 / tonne
- Minden Hills$213.48 / tonne
- Dysart et al$270.79 / tonne
- Algonquin Highlands$422.76 / tonne
Winter control spending per lane kilometre · 2023
finance.expenses.winter_control divided by roads.winter_lane_km, in the latest year both are filed by all four municipalities.
- Highlands East$953.66 / km
- Minden Hills$1,132 / km
- Dysart et al$1,978 / km
- Algonquin Highlands$2,820 / km
Left out
- Paved road spending per lane kilometre. Cost over a denominator the four municipalities do not define the same way. Highlands East files 16 lane kilometres of hot-mix as its paved network where its neighbours count surface treatment, so this reads as $136,392 a lane kilometre and is a filing convention rather than a cost. Compare on the winter lane kilometre, which is defined the same way by all four.
- Unpaved road spending per lane kilometre. The other side of the same split. What counts as unpaved depends on where each municipality put surface treatment.
Cost per person served
The other half of the question, and the harder one. What a municipality spends per person is the figure most people mean by efficiency, and it depends entirely on which people you count. This atlas divides by the person-year: permanent residents plus seasonal dwellings weighted for the share of the year they are occupied.
Ordered from least to most spent. That is not an order of merit. Spending less may be thrift or it may be a deferred road, and this atlas does not claim to know which. So the ranking here is reported, and the score above is not extended to cover it.
Total operating expenses per person-year · 2023
- Highlands East$1,498
- Minden Hills$1,518
- Dysart et al$1,567
- Algonquin Highlands$1,638
By service, per person-year
Green and ▼ mark the least spent on a service, amber and ▲ the most. The opposite way round from the comparison table, because this one is a cost and the low figure is the notable one. Least is not best: a service can be cheap because it is not being provided.
| Service | Dysart et al | Minden Hills | Highlands East | Algonquin Highlands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bridge and culvert | $53 most spent of the four | $4 least spent of the four | $20 | $8 |
| Building and protective inspection | $69 | $41 least spent of the four | $82 most spent of the four | $80 |
| Fire protection | $59 least spent of the four | $81 | $104 | $196 most spent of the four |
| Governance (council) | $18 least spent of the four | $22 | $36 most spent of the four | $32 |
| Library | $9 most spent of the four | $2 least spent of the four | $4 | $6 |
| Paved road | $284 | $268 least spent of the four | $337 | $413 most spent of the four |
| Planning and development | $64 most spent of the four | $62 | $36 | $34 least spent of the four |
| Policing | $186 | $182 | $181 least spent of the four | $197 most spent of the four |
| Recreation and culture | $213 | $266 | $134 least spent of the four | $295 most spent of the four |
| Solid waste disposal | $191 most spent of the four | $103 | $97 | $25 least spent of the four |
| Transportation services | $464 | $370 least spent of the four | $475 | $677 most spent of the four |
| Unpaved road | $17 | $27 | $49 most spent of the four | $9 least spent of the four |
| Waste diversion | $39 | $22 least spent of the four | $47 | $55 most spent of the four |
| Winter control | $88 most spent of the four | $63 least spent of the four | $63 | $87 |
What geography does to the same money
Per person is a question about who is served. Per kilometre of road and per square kilometre are questions about how far apart they are. The largest of these municipalities is 1,474 square kilometres and the smallest 688, and one corner of the county is 3.2 times emptier than another. The same total operating spending, 2023, divided three ways.
| Municipality | Per person-year | Per road km | Per km² | People per km² | Road km per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dysart et al | $1,567 | $55,750 | $12,037 | 5.4 | 40.3 |
| Minden Hills | $1,518 | $54,846 | $17,647 | 9.2 | 35.1 |
| Highlands East | $1,498 | $58,676 | $14,084 | 6.1 | 39.5 |
| Algonquin Highlands | $1,638 | $90,302 | $9,748 | 2.8 | 38.0 |
Per person-year the four are within 9 per cent of each other. Per kilometre of road they are not: Algonquin Highlands spends 54 per cent more than the next, and it is the same municipality that looks ordinary on the population basis. Per square kilometre the order turns over again and Algonquin Highlands is the cheapest of the four.
The last column is why that matters. Road kilometres per thousand residents run from 35 to 40, which is near enough identical. These municipalities do not maintain meaningfully different lengths of road per resident, so the gap per kilometre is not a servicing burden shared out differently. It is a difference in what a kilometre costs, which is the thing the ratios at the top of this page measure directly.
None of these three is the right one. Roads, winter control and bridges answer to distance; a library and a council do not. The cost-per-unit ratios above divide each service by the unit that drives it, which is the only reason they can be scored at all.
What a cheap year can be bought with
Debt is not on this page as a score and should not be. A cost per unit is a rate of spending; debt is how a council paid for something it already bought, and borrowing to build a bridge that lasts fifty years is not inefficiency. But a year can be made to look cheap by deferring the work, by drawing the reserves down, or by borrowing, and none of those shows up in a cost per kilometre. So the balance sheet sits beside the score rather than inside it. The year below is 2023, the latest all four filed both figures.
| Municipality | Reserves per person-year | Debt per person-year | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dysart et al | $587 | $153 | $435 |
| Minden Hills | $1,253 | $1,095 | $158 |
| Highlands East | $1,614 | $0 | $1,614 |
| Algonquin Highlands | $1,620 | $0 | $1,620 |
Two of the four hold no long-term debt at all. Highlands East has never filed a liabilities line, and Algonquin Highlands cleared its last in 2021. In both cases the return proves the nil on another page rather than leaving it as a blank: how that is established.
Which of these positions is better run is exactly the judgement this atlas declines to make. Reserves are prudence or an underspend that should have been a road; debt is a burden or a fair way to make the people who use a bridge for fifty years pay for it. The figures are here so that a cost-per-unit ranking is not read without them.
Why the person-year
Roughly 54% of the dwellings in this county are not occupied by permanent residents, and the population of Algonquin Highlands multiplies more than five times between February and July. All of those people use a road, a landfill and a fire department. Only the permanent ones are in the census count the province publishes.
Ontario’s own benchmarking divides by that census count and handles the rest in a footnote. The BMA Municipal Study, which most Ontario municipalities buy and cite, lists among the things that influence a municipality’s results “seasonal residents … who require police services and are not captured in population-based measures”. That is the standard naming this problem and leaving it alone.
Florida had to solve it. Consumption-based impact fee studies there compute two populations and divide by whichever suits the service: a weighted population, meaning permanent residents plus weighted seasonal ones, and a functional population, meaning the weekly 24-hour population. The person-year here is the functional population under another name, and its 0.30 weighting is derived from fire-call seasonality in two of these municipalities rather than assumed.
It is the default here for two reasons. It is the only one of the three that answers “per person actually served”, and the practice that had to answer this question for real arrived at the same instrument. It is still modelled, and every card built on it says so.
What changes on the other two
The municipality that spends least per person is Highlands East on the person-year, Minden Hills on permanent residents and Algonquin Highlands on peak. Nothing about the four changed between those sentences.