Municipal Performance Measurement Program

Background

The Municipal Performance Measurement Program (MPMP) is an initiative designed by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to provide taxpayers with information on service delivery and municipalities with a tool to improve those services over time.

Objectives of the program are:

• to provide a tool to assess how well municipal services are delivered
• to improve performance: measuring the efficiency (cost) and effectiveness (quality) of local services
• to strengthen local accountability to taxpayers and promote greater understanding of municipal responsibilities by the taxpayer, and
• to provide a systematic resource that allows municipalities to share information on performance and learn better/new practices from each other

The program was introduced for the 2000 reporting year and has been refined each year since then. The program requires municipalities to collect specific data on core service areas, submit their data to the Province and report to their constituents on the results.

In order to meet the requirements of the report to taxpayers, Municipalities can report to their taxpayers through direct mail, the property tax bill, and ads in local newspapers or periodicals. They can alternatively post the information on their website. As we did with the previous year's results, I am recommending that the measures shown in Appendix A be posted on our website.

The Province has published on their website, a summary of 2003, 2002 and 2001 information that allows municipalities and taxpayers to view results in the context of various municipal groupings (individual results are not published by the Province). Caution should be used when comparing measures between municipalities. Factors such as differences in municipal standards, expenditure classifications, weather conditions, etc. make meaningful comparisons difficult.

In a complimentary effort, about 15 municipalities (the County of Brant being one member) have joined to form the Ontario Municipal CAO's Benchmarking Initiative. The Ontario Municipal CAO's Benchmarking Initiative is a partnership project to push for service excellence in municipal government. Participating municipalities are working together to identify and share performance statistics, operational best practices and to network in a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. Expert Panels have been created to study long term care, roads, solid waste, emergency measures service (ambulance), water and wastewater services. In total, data is collected for 33 service areas. The results of the 2005 data were released, and illustrate comparisons between municipalities on these MPMP measures along with a variety of other measures which provide insight into each municipality's operations.

Along with these two initiatives is the Ontario Centre for Municipal Best Practices. This is a partnership, formed in 2002, between the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. It is intended to be a virtual electronic library of practices in effect in one or more Ontario municipalities which have contributed to the efficiency and/or effectiveness of municipal services and have been identified by objective means based on the results of Ontario's Municipal Performance Measurement Program (MPMP). The Centre is founded on the belief that municipal service performance measures can assist municipalities in their continuous quest to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their services.

Click here to view the 2009 Performance Measures (pdf )