[Antigonish]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Amalgamation would always make sense in theory but what we saw here in NS at least failed to deliver on the promise of efficiencies and reduced costs. Aside from the costs of the amalgamation itself - paying consultants to design and lay out the new organization, having 3 or 4 incumbents compete for the one (bigger) job closest to the one they did, then paying severance to the losers; adjusting all bureaucrat salaries upwards to the highest level of any in the various units in the name of equity; then realizing that many of those anointed as successful candidates were in way over their heads in terms of doing the much more complex new job, leading to dysfunction, more severance, and instability in the bureaucracy. Since bureaucrats, like nature, abhor a vacuum, in the newly created municipality you often have internecine turf wars over who really holds power and pulls the strings, as top bureaucrats wrestle for ever-more lucrative and powerful positions.

Then you have the issues of integrating various information systems, which usually mean throwing everything out and buying newer, bigger and far more expensive systems; dealing with all the fixed assets, getting unions to agree to change who they represent (which is usually long, painful and often a hopeless task) and then dealing with their demands for members to all be raised up to the highest level someone else now under the same umbrella is making. Getting rid of redundant union members is also almost impossible or at the very least quite costly.

Just look at the examples of both HRM and CBRM for how things can go so badly wrong.

Any idea if there are some kind of documents, reports, etc that can help quantify this? I'm on your wave length, but I guess people won't truly believe you without [source? source?? do you have a source for that? a reputable one??]. I can see it being a disaster here without proper convincing through a more 'professional' approach.