This week Steve Gilchrist, the Minister for Municipal Affairs and Housing, announced that the structure of municipal government is going to drastically change. The regions of Ottawa-Carleton, Haldimand-Norfolk, Hamilton-Wentworth and Sudbury are due for major overhauls by year's end.

The government will simplify the structure of governance (read reduce the number of cities and tiers) in each region. The Minister will appoint four "special advisors" to consult for 60 to 90 days and then bring recommendations to Cabinet for legislative action.

This continues the rationalization effort that began during the government's first mandate which saw the number of municipalities reduced by 28% from 815 to 586. Most notable amongst these was the creation of the new City of Toronto through the merger of Etobicoke, York, East York, Toronto, North York and Scrarborough and the regional government in Toronto into one 2.5 million-person megacity.

The government hopes to force a streamlining of local service delivery and thereby reduce local property taxes. Reducing the numbers of municipal politicians is a nice by-product from this process. Laudable goals indeed, but the special advisors won't have it easy.

All four regions have two-tier local government. The upper-tier municipalities (the regional governments) for the most part are delivering policing, transportation, solid waste management, public works, water and sewer, and statute mandated urban planning services. Due to provincial downloading, social welfare and housing services have also been added to their service inventory. Lower-tier municipalities (the cities) deliver local roads, libraries, parks and recreation, simple zoning, fire fighting and make work urban planning services.

However, there is much overlap and duplication in this mix where savings can be found and each region also has more politicians than most provinces have MPPs or MLAs.

This two-tier structure has evolved over the past 30 years. The original plan was that regional governments would coordinate urban sprawl and metropolitan services while the cities would focus on local concerns. But the end result has been that local government itself (at both tiers) continues to sprawl and taxpayers pay the price. Indeed, Ontarians pay the highest real property taxes in Canada.

While each of the four regions is different, the characteristics of the political debate are eerily similar. The cities want to abolish the regions, the regions want to abolish the cities and wherever you go, the tone is nasty, personal and compromise is not an option.

As Trent University economics Professor Harry Kitchen notes "… there is no consensus among municipal officials and policy analysts on the preferred option. In many cases the choice is driven by political opportunism, in some cases it is driven by a desire to preserve local identity; in other cases, it is driven by political motives including determination to create a stronger political base from which a local politician may wish to operate …"

Given all this, the special advisors must follow do the following in order to succeed.

Focus on services. Restructuring service delivery provides the best savings for taxpayers and yields a template from which new political structures can be derived. Be transparent. Engage local leaders and taxpayers alike in your consultations. Finally, they must have courage. They won't make many friends, but their task is necessary. And if this also means criticizing past or recent provincial policy decisions, so be it.