Selecting the Comparators

Selecting the right municipalities, to compare to Owen Sound, is extremely important. Each comparator must model the characteristics of the municipality being studied. If the comparator municipalities do not reflect the characteristics of the municipality, the resulting data will be flawed and therefore any conclusions will be invalid.

Unlike the Toronto consultants, I believe that selecting the right municipalities to compare with Owen Sound is very much a science. The Toronto consultants used several Single-Tier municipalities in their comparison group for Owen Sound which is a Lower-Tier municipality. Given that Lower-Tier municipalities rely on upper-tier governments to provide some services, including Single-Tier municipalities contaminates the results and diminishes the value of the study. Including these in the comparative group cannot result in a fair comparison. Therefore any conclusions drawn from the comparison of services will be flawed and unreliable. For this reason I considered only Lower-Tier municipalities for my study group.

Most would agree that the municipalities should have similar populations. Some would believe that comparing municipalities with similar populations is sufficient. However I believe that the delivery of municipal services is much more complex. So, when selecting municipalities I went a little further and chose municipalities that also had a similar number of occupied dwellings, and relatively similar population densities. I selected Tillsonburg, Thorold, Cobourg, Huntsville, Kingsville, Amherstburg and Strathroy-Caradoc to compare with Owen Sound. I will explain why I chose these municipalities in the following paragraphs.

Population
Exactly where to draw the line when it comes to population is fairly subjective. BMA Reports groups municipalities in distinct categories of “Less than 15,000”; “15,000 to 30,000” etc. I feel that a 15,000 spread in population was too great for a municipality of only 21,612. Therefore I selected a spread of only 6,000. As it turned out the municipalities I selected are pretty much within +/- 3000 from Owen Sound. The three municipalities that were closest to Owen Sound’s population of 21,612 they were, Kingsville (21,552), Huntsville (21,147) and Cobourg (20,515).

Total Dwellings
After reviewing the municipal data found on the Statistics Canada website I selected a range for the total number of dwellings to be between 8,000 and 10,000 which included occupied dwellings, both owner occupied and renters and non-occupied dwellings. The three municipalities that are closest to Owen Sound’s 9,895 are Strathroy-Caradoc (9,455), Amherstburg (9,205), and Cobourg (9,130).

Owner Occupied Dwellings
When considering the number of dwellings that were occupied by the owner I selected a range for the total number of dwellings to be between 5,500 and 6,500 which includes a wide range of dwellings including semi-detached houses, detached houses, condominiums, row housing etc. The three municipalities that are closest to Owen Sound’s owner-occupied dwelling count of 5,740 are Tillsonburg (5,830), Thorold (6,310) and Cobourg (6,275).

Population Density
In Ontario we have some municipalities that are largely rural, some that are largely urban and those that are a mixture of both. For this study I selected a combination of largely urban municipalities and those that had a largely urban population with a small number of rural residents. Municipalities with largely urban populations, but occupying larger rural areas, have the additional expense of maintaining a larger municipal road system, while urban municipalities, with little or no rural areas, face an additional social and policing costs associated with high population densities.

The three municipalities that are closest to Owen Sound’s population density of 879.2 residents per square kilometer are Tillsonburg (838.6), Thorold (226.5) and Cobourg (915.7). These along with the other comparators are shown below in Table 1.

Table 1; the Final Comparator Group for Owen Sound                  Source: Statistics Canada

When I examined the available municipalities that matched all four criteria to compare to Owen Sound, I found that each municipality in my study group appeared in the top three to Owen Sound at least once. . Both Tillsonburg and Thorold, appeared twice in the top three. Cobourg appeared in the top three in all three in the four categories This tells us that all municipalities in the study group are good comparators to Owen Sound and that Cobourg is nearly a perfect match to Owen Sound.

Table 2; Percentage variance from Owen Sound of the Three Primary Comparators Source: Statistics Canada

In order of best match with Owen Sound there are, 1. Cobourg, 2.Tillsonburg and 3.Thorold. For this reason they will be identified as the “Primary” comparators in the charts and as such it would be fair to give a little more weight to these comparators. As well given that Cobourg is almost identical to Owen Sound in all areas it is reasonable to expect that Owen Sound’s Expenses and Revenues to be very close to those of Cobourg.

Read How Owen Sound Revenues Compare