We Used to Talk to the Neighbours. Now We Call the Municipality. What Is That Doing to Local Government?

During a visit to Prince Edward County to investigate a complaint, a provincial ministry staff member made an observation that stuck with the person who heard it:

“Prince Edward County is full of grievances.”

It is an anecdote, not a statistic. County First has not independently verified the precise wording through a ministry record, and one official’s impression cannot establish that Prince Edward County residents complain more than people elsewhere.

But the remark points toward a much bigger question – one that reaches far beyond Prince Edward County.

For generations, many of the small irritations of rural life never became municipal files. If a neighbour’s dog barked, a fence caused a disagreement, grass grew too long, somebody parked inconveniently, a light shone across a property line or someone’s property looked untidy, the first response was often remarkably simple: walk next door and talk about it.

Sometimes the neighbours reached an accommodation. Sometimes they did not. Sometimes people simply tolerated things they disliked because living in a community meant accepting that other people had farms, animals, machinery, businesses, children and different ideas about what constituted an acceptable property.

Increasingly, there is another option.

Pick up the phone. Send an email. Complete an online complaint form.

Call the municipality.

That seemingly small change in behaviour may have surprisingly large consequences for local government. A conversation over a fence costs taxpayers nothing. A municipal complaint can require intake, record creation, an officer’s review, travel to a property, an inspection, correspondence, follow-up, an order or penalty, documentation and sometimes an appeal.

One complaint costs very little.

Thousands of complaints, repeated year after year across hundreds of municipalities, create workload.

Workload creates positions.

Positions require supervisors, vehicles, offices, software, policies and budgets.

Thousands of complaints, repeated year after year across hundreds of municipalities, create workload. And workload eventually becomes payroll.

The economics are surprisingly large. Current Ontario municipal job postings put experienced by-law enforcement officers at roughly $80,000 to $114,000 a year in salary alone. Once benefits, pension contributions, payroll costs, a vehicle, fuel, insurance, computers and software, training, office space, management and administrative support are included, a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate is that one additional enforcement position can represent roughly $140,000 to $180,000 a year of municipal capacity.

That means an additional five-person enforcement unit can readily represent $700,000 to $900,000 a year. Ten positions can approach $1.4 million to $1.8 million. And these are recurring costs – roughly $7 million to $9 million for five positions over a decade, or $14 million to $18 million for ten, before allowing for future wage and cost increases.

Now scale the question across Ontario’s 444 municipalities. If growing complaint volumes eventually required, on average, just one additional enforcement-related position in one-quarter of Ontario municipalities, that would represent about 111 additional positions and roughly $16 million to $20 million in annual municipal capacity at the assumptions above.

If the average effect were one position across half of Ontario municipalities, the order of magnitude becomes approximately 222 positions and $31 million to $40 million annually. Those figures are scenarios, not estimates of positions that Ontario municipalities have actually added; determining the real number would require municipal staffing and workload data.

The institutional effect can also extend beyond the officer answering the complaint. Enough officers require supervisors. Enforcement requires vehicles, fuel, insurance and maintenance. Complaints require case-management software and records. Orders generate correspondence. Contested orders can require managers, clerks, lawyers, tribunals or courts. New regulations require policies and procedures. Eventually what began as hundreds of individual calls becomes a permanent municipal department with a permanent operating budget.

There is real-world evidence of this mechanism. Brampton’s Enforcement and By-Law Services investigated 123,895 service requests in 2024 – 13 per cent more than the previous year – including 21,723 property-standards complaints and 15,404 other municipal complaints. Toronto’s 2024 budget provides an even clearer illustration of how workload becomes headcount: the city added eight by-law enforcement officers and a supervisor to one enforcement program and separately allocated additional funding for officers responding to noise and other enforcement demands.

The cost may be much larger than the officer who arrives at the door.

Across Ontario, the municipal regulatory and enforcement system likely costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year. County First estimates that a broad system encompassing by-law enforcement, property standards, licensing, animal enforcement and the supervision and administrative infrastructure directly supporting those functions could plausibly represent $400 million to $700 million annually province-wide. Toronto alone budgeted almost $50 million for By-law Compliance and Enforcement in 2025.

Not all of that expenditure is driven by complaints, and much of it performs necessary public functions. The unanswered question is how much municipal capacity is consumed specifically by complaint-driven enforcement – and, within that workload, how much involves disputes that neighbours might once have resolved themselves.

A simple sensitivity analysis shows why the answer matters. If complaint handling consumes 20 to 40 per cent of Ontario’s broader municipal enforcement system, the associated cost could be roughly $80 million to $280 million a year. If only one-quarter to one-half of that workload could reasonably have been avoided through informal resolution or voluntary compliance, the potential cost of avoidable complaint-driven government could still be on the order of $20 million to $140 million every year.

These are scenarios, not measured provincial totals. Ontario does not appear to publish a consolidated figure identifying how much municipal enforcement expenditure originates with public complaints, much less how many of those complaints ultimately identify an actual violation. That missing information is itself important.

The province already collects detailed financial information from all 444 municipalities through the Financial Information Return. Municipalities also possess their complaint and enforcement records. Putting those datasets together could answer a question taxpayers have rarely been asked to consider: how much are we collectively paying government to resolve conflicts that once ended with a conversation over the fence?

None of this means those positions were unnecessary. It demonstrates the mechanism.

A neighbour-to-neighbour conversation has essentially no municipal cost.

A complaint that reaches municipal hall does.

Multiply that transaction thousands of times, institutionalize the response and repeat it every year, and something that begins as individual neighbourhood friction can become millions of dollars of permanent municipal expenditure.

And what began as a disagreement between two neighbours can eventually become part of the permanent cost of local government.

The question for Prince Edward County – and for rural municipalities across Ontario and North America – is whether we have gradually replaced talking to our neighbours with calling local government, and then built a larger local government to answer the phone.

This Is Not Just a Prince Edward County Story

There is evidence that complaints have become a significant part of municipal government across Ontario.

The Ontario Ombudsman received a record 3,809 cases concerning general municipal issues in 2024-25, up from 3,595 the previous year. By-law enforcement was the single largest complaint and inquiry category, with 533 cases – up from 449 a year earlier and 397 the year before that.[1][2]

That is a 34 per cent increase in by-law enforcement cases reaching the Ombudsman in two years.

The examples are remarkably ordinary. The Ombudsman’s reports describe disputes involving tall weeds on neighbouring property, chickens crossing a property line, bright lights shining into a neighbour’s home, snow markers, parking tickets and backyard debris.[1][2]

Some involved legitimate failures by municipalities. Some required intervention. Some affected people with disabilities or raised questions of procedural fairness. These examples should not be dismissed as frivolous simply because they concern everyday life.

But collectively they illustrate something important about modern local government.

Increasingly, municipalities are expected to referee the relationships between neighbours.

Every Complaint Creates Work Somewhere

Ontario’s own guidance to municipal councillors recognizes the connection between regulation and bureaucracy.

Before adopting a by-law, the province tells councillors to consider what it will cost to administer, whether existing staff can handle the additional responsibilities or whether more staff will be required, and whether the municipality is prepared to enforce the rule consistently.[3]

The guidance also recognizes another important point: municipal enforcement personnel need diplomacy, tact and negotiating skills because many complaints can be resolved without going to court.[3]

That is effectively the administrative chain in plain language:

A problem generates complaints.

Complaints create political pressure.

Political pressure can produce a by-law or program.

A by-law requires administration.

Administration requires staff.

Staff create recurring operating costs.

None of those individual steps is necessarily unreasonable. The problem is cumulative.

A municipality does not normally wake up one morning and decide to build a bureaucracy. It accumulates one increment at a time – one new rule, one new licensing system, one additional enforcement responsibility, one new reporting requirement and eventually one more employee needed to administer all of them.

Over ten or twenty years, those increments can substantially change the size and character of local government.

Prince Edward County Is a Useful Case Study

Prince Edward County makes an unusually useful place to examine this phenomenon because the community itself has changed rapidly.

Its permanent population increased from 24,735 in 2016 to 25,704 in 2021 – only 3.9 per cent. But that modest net increase conceals extraordinary population turnover.

The County Foundation’s Vital Signs data reports that 6,240 people moved into Prince Edward County between 2016 and 2021, compared with 3,515 during the previous census period. Another 3,562 people left during 2016-21.[4]

In other words, fewer than 1,000 people were added to the net population, but more than six times that number moved into the community.

That can transform a place without producing dramatic population growth.

People arrive with different experiences, expectations and ideas about what municipal government should do. Long-time residents change too. Tourism grows. Property values rise. Housing becomes more expensive. Neighbourhoods become denser. Short-term rentals appear. Land once regarded primarily as rural property becomes a valuable investment.

It would be unfair – and unsupported by the available evidence – to say that people arriving from Toronto, Ottawa or other cities complain more than people who have lived in a rural community for generations.

County First has found no data establishing that.

But large-scale population turnover can change the expectations placed upon institutions. That hypothesis can be tested.

From “Go Talk to Your Neighbour” to “Call By-law”

Consider how differently a minor dispute can unfold.

A neighbour has a bright exterior light pointing toward the house next door.

Under the informal model, one neighbour walks over and says: “Would you mind turning that light down or pointing it somewhere else?”

Perhaps the light is moved that evening.

Under the institutional model, the affected resident contacts the municipality. Someone receives the complaint. It is entered into a system. An officer may review the applicable by-law, contact the complainant, inspect the property, communicate with the neighbour, determine compliance, record what happened and potentially return for follow-up.

The problem may still be solved.

But now government has become the intermediary.

Multiply that process across dogs, fences, weeds, garbage, noise, signs, parking, chickens, exterior lighting, property standards, short-term accommodations and countless other points of friction and an important question emerges:

How much municipal capacity is now devoted to managing relationships that residents once managed themselves?

That is not an argument for eliminating by-law enforcement. Serious problems require intervention. Residents should not have to personally confront threatening neighbours. Chronic noise, unsafe buildings, environmental hazards, illegal construction and serious zoning violations can require government enforcement.

The question is where the line should be.

Prince Edward County Already Recognizes the Problem

Prince Edward County’s own approach contains an important clue.

Its By-law Services information encourages neighbours to work together, while officers seek voluntary compliance before moving to enforcement. The County has formal enforcement responsibilities covering property standards, grass cutting, noise, parking, zoning, backyard hens, signs, camping, mobile food vendors and other activities.

Short-term accommodations created another layer. Residents can report unlicensed STAs directly to the municipality, while noise involving STA guests can be directed to County By-law Enforcement seven days a week.[5]

That infrastructure exists because there are genuine problems to manage. The rapid growth of whole-home vacation rentals produced disputes involving noise, parking, garbage, housing and commercialization of residential neighbourhoods.

But the administrative consequences illustrate the broader phenomenon particularly well.

Residents complained.

Council regulated.

Licensing required applications.

Applications required processing.

Properties required inspections.

Rules required enforcement.

Enforcement required officers.

Complaints required responses.

Appeals and penalties required administration.

A social and economic change eventually became a permanent municipal system.

The Sunshine List Is a Warning Light, Not the Diagnosis

In Prince Edward County, the most visible indication of the changing municipal organization is Ontario’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure list.

Only 12 County employees appeared on the list in 2015. By 2023 there were 64. In 2024 there were 62. In 2025 there were 92, with CountyLive reporting roughly $12 million in disclosed salaries and taxable benefits.[6]

Those numbers sound dramatic, but they require considerable context.

The $100,000 disclosure threshold has not been indexed to inflation, so more employees naturally cross it over time. Prince Edward County also had an unusual 27th pay period affecting some 2025 compensation, and negotiated wage increases and labour-market pressures have increased compensation.

A growing Sunshine List therefore does not prove municipal bloat.

But it is a warning light telling taxpayers to examine the underlying organization.

County First’s review of municipal budgets found that salaries, wages and benefits increased from roughly $20 million in 2016 to approximately $34.7 million by 2024 – approximately 74 per cent in nominal dollars.

Some of that is inflation. Some reflects wage settlements. Some reflects additional responsibilities and services.

The remaining question is how much reflects a municipality that has simply learned to do more things.

This Is Where “Municipal Bloat” Actually Comes From

The phrase “municipal bloat” can conjure an image of employees sitting around Shire Hall inventing unnecessary work.

That is usually too simplistic.

Bureaucracies can grow because citizens demand services.

Residents want noisy rentals controlled.

They want unsafe buildings inspected.

They want property standards enforced.

They want planning applications scrutinized.

They want environmental protection.

They want heritage rules.

They want parking controlled.

They want councillors’ conduct investigated.

They want governments to respond to emails quickly and document what they did.

Each demand can be reasonable.

But each demand has a price.

Government is unusual because the person demanding a service rarely receives a bill showing its marginal cost. A resident can make repeated complaints to a by-law department without directly paying the cost of the officer’s time. The cost is socialized across the entire tax base.

That creates an important asymmetry.

The individual benefit of complaining may be immediate.

The administrative cost is dispersed among thousands of taxpayers.

There Is Another Cost: Opportunity

Every dollar spent on administration cannot simultaneously be spent somewhere else.

Prince Edward County’s 2026 tax-supported operating budget is $87.7 million, with $56.8 million raised through taxation. Its capital budget adds another $22.6 million.[7]

At the same time, the County faces substantial infrastructure requirements involving roads, bridges, buildings, water and wastewater systems and other physical assets.

This creates the most important question in the entire debate.

Not whether a by-law officer does useful work.

Not whether a planner deserves a salary.

Not whether a particular resident had a legitimate complaint.

But whether the cumulative allocation of municipal resources still reflects the community’s priorities.

A municipality can simultaneously have hardworking employees and too much administration.

Those propositions are not contradictory.

A Complaint Culture Can Become Self-Reinforcing

There may also be a feedback loop.

The easier government makes it to complain, the more attractive formal complaints become compared with informal resolution.

More complaints create pressure for enforcement.

More enforcement makes residents increasingly aware that government can resolve neighbour disputes.

That expectation can generate still more complaints.

More complaints then justify more resources.

Eventually residents may stop asking whether something actually requires government intervention and start asking why the municipality has not already intervened.

That is how the relationship between citizen and local government can gradually change.

Government stops being the last resort for disputes people cannot reasonably solve themselves.

It becomes the first call.

Whether that feedback loop is actually occurring in Prince Edward County – or any particular municipality – requires evidence. But Ontario’s rising by-law complaint numbers make the question worth asking. By-law enforcement cases reaching the Ombudsman increased from 397 in 2022-23 to 449 in 2023-24 and 533 in 2024-25.[1][2]

Some Complaints Absolutely Should Go Straight to Government

There is an important boundary.

No resident should be expected to confront someone they fear. Serious safety issues, threats, dangerous buildings, environmental contamination, repeated commercial disturbances and other significant violations may require immediate intervention.

Nor should informal neighbour resolution become an excuse for municipalities to ignore legitimate enforcement responsibilities.

The point is not that complaints are bad.

It is that government intervention has a cost, and communities should distinguish between problems that require the coercive or regulatory authority of government and ordinary human friction that can often be resolved by conversation.

That distinction appears to be disappearing from many discussions about municipal service.

Every County Should Publish a Complaint Dashboard

There is a remarkably simple way to test whether complaint-driven government is expanding.

Every municipality should publish an annual dashboard showing:

Total by-law complaints received.
Complaints by category – noise, property standards, parking, animals, zoning, signs, STAs and other major areas.
Number of unique properties generating complaints.
Number of unique complainants, reported only in aggregate so individuals cannot be identified.
Number and percentage of complaints where no violation was ultimately found.
Number resolved through education or voluntary compliance.
Number resulting in orders, penalties or charges.
Number of repeat complaints involving the same property.
Annual by-law enforcement staffing measured in full-time equivalents.
Total annual cost of enforcement.
Number of inspections and officer visits.
Average time spent per complaint category where the municipality can reasonably calculate it.

The fifth number may be particularly revealing.

If complaint volumes are increasing but the percentage resulting in confirmed violations is falling, that could support the hypothesis that residents are increasingly using municipal government to referee ordinary disagreements.

If complaints and confirmed violations are rising together, the explanation may be very different: communities may genuinely be experiencing more regulatory problems.

Either result would be useful.

Building Departments Need a Different Dashboard

Building services should be measured separately because their workload is substantially driven by construction and statutory requirements.

Municipalities should publish annual permit volumes, inspections, complaint-generated inspections, full-time-equivalent staffing and processing times for complete applications.

That allows taxpayers to distinguish between additional staff required because the community is building more and additional staff required because the administrative system itself has expanded.

The same principle should apply across municipal government.

Do not simply publish the number of employees.

Publish the workload that justifies them.

Councils Should Ask One Question Before Every New Rule

Ontario’s municipal guidance already points councils toward the right question when considering a new by-law: what will it cost to administer, and can existing staff handle the additional responsibility?[3]

That question deserves much greater prominence.

Before creating a new licensing program, enforcement regime, advisory structure or regulatory requirement, Council should receive an administrative-cost statement explaining:

What problem is being solved?

How many incidents or complaints actually occurred?

Can existing legislation already address it?

Could education, mediation or voluntary compliance solve much of it?

How many staff hours will the new system require?

Will another employee eventually be needed?

What will the program cost taxpayers over five or ten years?

And what existing municipal priority will receive less money as a result?

Governments routinely estimate the financial cost of bridges and buildings.

They should do the same for bureaucracy.

Maybe the First Question Should Be: “Have You Spoken to Your Neighbour?”

Municipalities could also deliberately rebuild informal problem-solving into their complaint systems.

For appropriate non-urgent complaints, an online form could ask:

“Have you attempted to discuss this issue with your neighbour?”

A “no” would not necessarily prevent a complaint. There are many circumstances in which direct contact is inappropriate or unsafe.

But the question itself sends an important message.

Government does not have to be the first intermediary in every disagreement between two adults.

Municipalities could provide voluntary neighbour-resolution guidance, mediation resources or a simple checklist for disputes involving noise, lights, fences and other non-safety matters.

The objective would not be to deny service.

It would be to preserve government intervention for situations in which government is actually needed.

Prince Edward County Can Test the Theory

This brings the story back to the ministry staffer’s memorable observation:

“Prince Edward County is full of grievances.”

Maybe it was unfair.

Maybe it reflected nothing more than one official’s experience with one contentious file.

Or perhaps it captured a broader change that many rural communities are experiencing.

Prince Edward County has undergone remarkable population turnover. Between 2016 and 2021, 6,240 people moved into a municipality whose net population increased by fewer than 1,000 people.[4]

Its municipal organization also became substantially more expensive during the past decade. Its regulatory systems became more sophisticated. Its Sunshine List expanded dramatically. Its payroll increased.

Those facts do not establish causation.

What is missing is the line connecting them.

Prince Edward County should therefore publish ten years of complaint volumes by category beside ten years of enforcement staffing and costs.

Put the lines on the same graph.

Then add one more line: the percentage of complaints that actually resulted in a confirmed violation or enforcement action.

That would tell residents far more about municipal bloat than another argument over whether one particular position is necessary.

One Town. One Lesson.

Prince Edward County is the case study, but the lesson belongs to every municipality.

Local government does not exist independently of the people it serves. When residents ask government to regulate more behaviour, investigate more complaints, administer more programs and resolve more disputes, government needs people to perform that work.

Over time, reasonable individual demands can accumulate into an expensive collective institution.

That means municipal bloat, where it exists, cannot automatically be blamed on municipal employees or politicians.

Residents may be helping to create it.

Every time two neighbours replace a conversation with a government complaint, somebody at municipal hall eventually has to answer.

The larger question is whether communities still remember that not every disagreement requires a government solution.

Before creating another file, perhaps the first question should sometimes be the simplest one:

Have you talked to your neighbour?

Sources and Footnotes

[1] Ombudsman Ontario – 2024-2025 Annual Report. The Ombudsman received a record 3,809 general municipal cases. By-law enforcement was the leading municipal complaint and inquiry category, with 533 cases, up from 449 the previous year.

https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/en/our-work/annual-reports/2024-2025-annual-report

[2] Ombudsman Ontario – 2023-2024 Annual Report. The Ombudsman reported 449 by-law enforcement complaints and inquiries, up from 397 the previous year.

https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/en/our-work/annual-reports/2023-2024-annual-report

[3] Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing – Ontario Municipal Councillor’s Guide, “Exercising municipal powers.” The guide tells councils considering a by-law to consider its administrative cost, whether existing staff can assume the additional responsibilities or more staff will be required, and whether the municipality can consistently enforce it.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/ontario-municipal-councillors-guide/8-exercising-municipal-powers

[4] The County Foundation – Vital Signs, Population and Migration. Reports 6,240 people moving into Prince Edward County between 2016 and 2021, compared with 3,515 during the preceding census period, while 3,562 residents moved out.

https://vitalsigns.thecountyfoundation.ca/data/post/population

[5] Prince Edward County – Short-Term Accommodation Frequently Asked Questions. The County provides channels for reporting unlicensed STAs and directs noise complaints involving STA guests to municipal By-law Enforcement. https://www.thecounty.ca/residents/services/short-term-accommodations/frequently-asked-questions-2/

[6] CountyLive – “County’s $12 million ‘Sunshine List’ alarms councillor,” March 29, 2026; Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure data. https://www.countylive.ca/countys-12-million-sunshine-list-alarms-councillor/

[7] Prince Edward County – 2026 County Budgets. The adopted tax-supported operating budget is $87.7 million, including $56.8 million raised through taxation, with a $22.6 million capital budget. https://www.thecounty.ca/county_news_notices/2026-county-budgets-adopted/

Disclaimer

This article examines a hypothesis about changing patterns of neighbour-to-neighbour dispute resolution, municipal complaints, regulation, staffing and public expenditure. Available evidence establishes that by-law enforcement is a major and growing source of municipal complaints reaching the Ontario Ombudsman and that Prince Edward County has experienced substantial population turnover and growth in municipal payroll and regulatory functions. It does not establish that one caused the other.

County First has not established that newcomers, residents from cities or any other demographic group complain more frequently than long-time rural residents. Nor has County First concluded that individual municipal employees or positions are unnecessary. References to municipal bloat concern the cumulative size, cost and administrative complexity of local government, not the conduct or work ethic of individual employees.

The recollection attributed to a provincial ministry staff member is presented as an anecdote rather than statistical evidence. The central hypothesis can be tested using municipal complaint, enforcement, workload, staffing and expenditure data. County First encourages municipalities to publish those records so residents can determine whether complaint-driven government is actually expanding and, if so, what is driving it.