Should the number of councils be cut?
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Geoffrey West at TED: The surprising math of cities
The issue of local government amalgamation is back on the table following a call by the Chair of the Bank of Melbourne, Elizabeth Proust, to slash the number of councils in Melbourne from 31 to one.
This isn’t an issue that’s specific to Melbourne. Metropolitan Sydney is administered by an astonishing 38 councils with a further five involved in managing urban overspill, while Adelaide has 19. The real standout though is metropolitan Perth which, although it has less than half Sydney’s population, requires an astounding 30 councils in order to operate.
In contrast, South East Qld (SEQ) seems grossly under-administered. SEQ has a population of 3.3 million and stretches from the Gold Coast to the Sunshine Coast – yet somehow it manages with just 10 councils.
One of those ten councils is the City of Brisbane, the model of local government that most advocates of amalgamation want to emulate elsewhere. It was created in 1925 by the union of 20 councils and manages an area of 1,367 sq km – roughly an 18-20 km radius around the city centre – with 1.1 million residents.
While the Lord Mayor of Sydney is firmly under the rod of the State Government over issues like bike paths, the City of Brisbane builds and operates key transport, water and sewerage infrastructure. For example, Brisbane Transport operates over a thousand buses and constructed one of the world’s leading Bus Rapid Transit systems.
Things were far worse in Victoria prior to major reforms implemented in the 1990s under the Kennett Government (when Elizabeth Proust was head of the Premier’s Department). The number of councils in the State was reduced from 210 to the current figure of 79 and the number in metropolitan Melbourne was almost halved.
The issue of amalgamation essentially comes down to the age-old tension between economies of scale on the one hand and the extent of local influence on the other.
The benefits of bigger councils are numerous. Depending on the size of the new amalgamated units, there’d be the usual savings that come with size, like potential economies in management costs and efficiencies in the delivery of basic services such as garbage collection and planning approvals. There should be fewer border problems and vastly better coordination of policies and operations across many more suburbs.
Those efficiency benefits alone are enough to justify large-scale amalgamation. However there should be significant additional benefits from the relatively greater weighting likely to be given to regional and/or metropolitan objectives – such as suburban densification – over localised concerns like opposition to redevelopment within specific neighbourhoods and streets.
A large council might also have the credibility and resources to formulate and apply significant policy initiatives; to finance and construct major infrastructure; and operate large business units in its own right. It could make significant decisions optimised for its regional context rather than the whole-of-State perspective, with its attendant compromises, taken by State Governments.
A large council would be more likely to focus on the big picture. The City of Brisbane has the wherewithal to invest in the sort of transport and water infrastructure it decides is in the best interests of residents. Of course this doesn’t mean it would necessarily make the right decisions – Brisbane’s elaborate riverside freeway system was largely built at the behest of council.
The downsides of joining councils up mostly relate to the real or perceived loss of political influence by residents and the potential for local issues to be ignored. The City of Brisbane has 26 Councillors (around one per 43,000 residents) whereas the City of Melbourne has ten (one per 9,300 residents) and the City of Sydney has ten (one per 18,000 residents).
Amalgamation is also a difficult issue for State politicians. Many don’t like local government anyway, but a State Government isn’t going to want to set up a series of large organisations that much of the time will be in public conflict with it over resources and policy. They’re even less likely to want to hand over responsibility for key government undertakings like transport.
So merging councils is always going to be an extremely difficult objective. The Holy Grail for most supporters of amalgamation is something like Brisbane – a single council covering those inner and middle ring suburbs that were constructed up to the 60s and 70s. In my view that’s far from ideal – a fully metropolitan council that manages all aspects of a city’s growth and operations seems eminently more sensible.
In fact that was the basis on which the City of Brisbane was established. In 1925 the boundary for the newly created authority extended well beyond the then urbanised area. Indeed, Brisbane didn’t start to breach its boundary on a serious scale until the 1960s/70s. It was intended to be a metropolitan council but the boundary didn’t keep up with its outward growth.
A metropolitan council should be responsible for the key infrastructure supporting the wider urban area. In principle that should include metropolitan roads and public transport (the City of Brisbane is only responsible for buses, not urban rail) because they can usually be “separated” from non-urban operations. In most cities, urban water, sewerage and drainage can also be easily identified and separated too.
There’ll be limits in some situations – perhaps there’re existing cross-subsidies between urban and country users that’re hard to disentangle – but the general idea is a metropolitan-wide council should be able to get on and do the things that make a city work.
Any discussion of amalgamations will sooner or later draw attention to the unfortunate historical legacy of State governments. As has been proposed since at least the Whitlam era, a better solution would be to create a two tier system with a Federal Government and large regional governments the size of SEQ.
But in the real world change hastens slowly. Simply reducing the number of councils in our major cities would be a big step forward. In Melbourne, amalgamating the City of Melbourne with the Cities of Yarra, Port Phillip and Stonnington (or at least the Prahran part) to create a greater inner city council 5 km around the CBD would be a logical, if modest, step because there’s a clear community of interest.
That would probably be way too threatening to our political process, so outer suburban amalgamations might be a more attractive option in the first instance. Say something like Werribee, Melton and Hume municipalities merged to form the City of MeWeHu?
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I think we should go even further and transfer most, if not all, state responsibilities to super-councils covering greater Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne (maybe Adelaide and Perth when they reach a certain population) and turn them into city-states. The remaining parts of the states can select a suitable regional city as a new capital (a boost for regional employment). It ends the city-country bickering within and between states.
City-states as components of a federation are common elsewhere in the world, for example Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg and Brussels. Canberra is already part of the way there with the ACT government performing the functions of both state and local government, although some functions are still administered by the Commonwealth.
Any time some internet person calls for the abolition of the States, I realise that they’re just making stuff up.
There will always be States, for as long as there is an Australian constitution. There is no way a referendum would pass to abolish the states. And for the record I would vote no against a proposal anyway. Victorian Ministers know a lot more about the relevant local issues than Canberra ones ever would – if you think services are out of touch when they’re from your local capital city, try one size fits all prescriptions coming from a far-off land!
@wilful, what part of a two-tiered system do you not understand? The suggestion is to give greater control to cities, which have a greater connection to their population than a state government would.
Who knows Alan, Will changing management arrangements give us better cities?
I’ve always felt that achieving good outcomes has much less to do with formal governance structures than it has with other factors like the personalities of the key players, as well as a host of largely serendipitous dynamics that create a receptive climate for reform…
Obviously I’m stirring, but the arguments being put forth do sound awfully similar so some opinions expressed in the past on a similar topic that you were quite sceptical of.
As for Ms. Proust’s inputs, I for one have had enough of her opinions in the media. Her calls for Baillieu to start spending up big on new infrastructure, and now to merge councils, again with the aim of getting more infrastructure happening both seem awfully self interested for a CEO of a bank that stands to make a lot of money if a whole bunch of new infrastructure projects start rolling out. Not to say that she isn’t right on some issues, but she certainly has a big conflict of interest.
IkaInk: “Very droll, Terry”. I was aware while writing this piece that this very point might be raised, but no problem because the two issues are very different. The public transport authority as we understood it at the time was essentially just about changing reporting lines. What I’m talking about here is changing the geographical scope of councils, the economies of scale of councils, and expanding their function to include major new responsibilities like transport. There’s really no similarity between the two cases. And let me add: did my skepticism prove to be close to the mark? And let me add something else: that 2nd para of yours seems very wise and insightful to me AD
“The public transport authority as we understood it at the time was essentially just about changing reporting lines.”
That’s not what I or others were advocating at all!
What we were talking about was changing the geographical scope of network planners to cover not just one mode but all three, and expanding their function to include major new responsibilities like coordinating timetables and removing route duplication.
It was about bringing functions that are currently developed in separate houses into one so they could be coordinated. Despite your claims to the contrary, this couldn’t be done with the current structure. The current structure involves letting Yarra Trams write a timetable, Metro write a timetable and the 100 or so bus companies write their own timetables and routes.
As to your scepticism, the Baillieu Government clearly didn’t see this legislation as very important and they have gotten the legislation wrong, its a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. That doesn’t mean what was being advocated for wasn’t/isn’t a good idea. I, and others advocating for change always said it needed to be done right for it to work.
The very same thing could happen with the proposals you’ve put forth here. If for example the Victorian Government decided that one mega council was a good idea, but instead of being fairly autonomous, they only acted as advisor’s for the state without any read powers, you could bet that things wouldn’t work very well.
IkaInk: I disagree. I think your recollection is very selective and confuses means with ends. The new management arrgts for transport were proposed as the means to achieve the other sorts of things you nominate. It was assumed an authority would produce the outcome. What I said at the time was merely creating a new authority was not a silver bullet and so it’s proven to be.
I disagree with your analogy too. The proper analogy would be if Elizabeth Proust had proposed something like reducing the number of Councillors, or having two Mayors, or having a State politician on every council, or something equally daft and trivial. Even without infrastructure responsibilities, amalgamation would have concrete benefits, like improved coordination and economies of scale.
Discussion about the transport authority is veering off-topic – if you want to continue the discussion it would be best to pursue it in the original thread you linked to. AD
I think councils as they are structured now are too small to properly carry out the functions delegated to them. Traffic Management and housing density come to mind. We’d all like to live in an idyllic village 6 km from the CBD but that’s no going to happen in a large and growing city, at least not without costs in congestion and long commutes as newer residents are banished to the margins. And look at local traffic controls, with uncoordinated street closures and calming measures forcing local traffic onto national highways. I’m not against quite streets, but such measures need to be coordinated with availability of public transport and traffic flow across a metro area, and this doesn’t seem to be happening. Most people have to leave their local area to work and socialise, moving across and into other LGA’s and becoming their problem. If more people worked and ‘recreated’ in their own local government area, maybe we would have better planning and better outcomes.
A local council administering a few suburbs in an area a few kilometers across is just too much hostage to Nimby activists. Local papers are full of stories about people worried about their property values pretending to be concerned about the environment.
If small councils were so good, why weren’t outer areas like Blacktown, Penrith and Sutherland broken into small chuncks like Waverly and Mosman as Sydney sprawled? Because they aren’t. In the case of Sydney, 5 or 6 councils would be more than enough – say inner city and East; North East; North West; South West and South.
@Nancarow Jake, which part of this is fanciful nonsense don’t you understand?
A simple way to define council structures in Melbourne would be to follow upper house boundaries.
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/images/maps/Map-stateMetropolitanRegionsandDistricts.pdf
The only issue with that is that I think there needs to be an inner region, comprising Albert Park, Prahran, Melbourne and Richmond.
AD wrote: “For example, Brisbane Transport operates over a thousand buses and constructed one of the world’s leading Bus Rapid Transit systems.”
Not so fast! The busway system was funded and built by the State government, often in conflict with the BCC; eg. the BCC held up the Northern busway for about 5 years because they demanded compensation ($25M) for “their” part of the King George Square parking station that was required to connect it up with the existing Myer-Centre station/busway. The BCC do run the buses though again the state subsidizes the ticketing.
The busway has matured a lot in the last few years (and the northern bit all the way to Kelvin Grove will open soonish) and I think that some voters may have mistakenly credited Campbell Newman with this, whereas the reality is he was obsessed with hyper-expensive tunnels for private transport.
Incidentally the busway was apparently designed so that in the future it could carry light-rail. We have reached that point (and it will surpass usability once the new northern busway opens, and the eastern one too). But forget any such necessary improvement by a Newman state government who will almost certainly do nothing but spend more on roads (possibly by trying to bail out the bankrupt private companies that run the toll tunnels).
Michael: Fair point. I wasn’t looking to give Campbell Newman (or Jim Soorley) any credit he doesn’t deserve. Hardly anything’s done these days without supplementary money being tipped in from another tier of government, as it should be in this case since Brisbane’s busways benefit users who live or work outside the Council’s boundary. AD
There really is a lot to be said for eliminating States and operating via super councils if only for the extraordinary duplication of policy, corporate, organisational and leadership development etc systems that goes on. It’s possible this focussing of effort would help us to achieve closer to world best practice more frequently, and have immense flow on for the community, but would of course require the setting up of super councils further around the country.
As a Melburnian I’m kind of skeptical about whether a single Melbourne Metro Council would really be of that much benefit given that the metro area has such a disproportionate chunk of the state’s population. In effect the State government is the mega council with additional responsibilities for other parts of the state. I realise this is not necessarily the case in other states (although WA and SA both have large capitals relative to the state’s size – notably Brisbane I think has the smallest share of population for any mainland capital).
Devolving functions to a Greater Melbourne Council from the state government would be messy and expensive, then non-Melb areas would lose the economies of scale with these government services not being provided from Melbourne – requiring either transfers from the centre or lower levels of service provision in the country.
For all the failings of this and previous state governments I don’t see how any Victorian government have really been unable to manage
“significant decisions optimised for its regional context rather than the whole-of-State perspective”
as you state. You only need to see the gravity of Melbourne specific issues in any State election campaign.
If there’s better administrative economies of scale from merging the existing councils into larger ones I’m fine with that, but the idea that there’s benefit from all the work of merging the lot of them is something I’m not convinced of.
In recent years, more and more responsibilities have been “outsourced” by Federal and State government to local government. Unfortunately, this has swelled the local government councils with tax money and tasks, without ensuring councils have the expertise and understanding required.
Those councils who thought they could be financial “players” before the GFC are a good example of how taxpayers’ money and needs can be respectively blown and ignored by an unskilled and/or navel-gazing local organization.
Yes, we need to make councils more efficient, to integrate them better into our changing world, but making them bigger can just magnify the problems. What we need are councils with functional, responsive links to taxpayers and State/Federal government, and with the skills and priorities needed to do the job.
Yes, I remember standing at a Brissie bus stop watching buses pass us by because they were already full and the Brisbane City Council without the funds to buy more buses cos then mayor Newman had hocked the council to the hilt to pay for tunnels which are barely used and are going broke.
Like michael r james, I think this will be exacerbated by the new mayor of Queensland.
State governments in Vic and NSW wont accept a huge metro council, ‘cos they would in effect form an alternative government, which is understandable. But then that depends on what a metro council would have control over. The main issue is making the right decisions mainly on transport and planning, and these are currently controlled by each State Government, in the case of Victoria through ministries that dont appear to be the least bit well informed or independent, with the glaring exception of Vicroads. What we really need is a far more independent, resourced metro planning body, one that can make important decisions and forward planning not subject to too much govt interference or lobbying from developers. But it would have to be transparent, and have public hearings, consult etc before making big decisions. teh same would be ideal for transport, as argued about above, with a transport agency responsible for public ans well as roads, or at least one as well resourced and independent as Vicroads for PT.
Preferably there should be elected people on the boards thereof, and this is where perhaps a metro-wide elected mayor could come in a la London, or even a number of members elected by the metro councils from among themselves.
Actually the greatest significance of numerous local councils is a more dynamic democratic process (as distinct from local influence), which perhaps counter intuitively creates a far more stable society and country.
My view evolved after a 4 year tour of duty in highly educated and resourced Waverley Council in Sydney’s East 1995-99.
I never see this intangible investment in social stability ever valued in discussions about consolidation of councils and economies of scale. That’s a shame. Like those (in)famous mining adverts of decades past, methinks you would miss them if they weren’t there.
I could give lots of examples – closure of the Waterloo Incinerator, prevention of a private heavy rail into Bondi Park charging exorbitant prices and with highrise overtopping the station on the beachfront, analysis of and preventing any repeat of the ‘boredom’ riots of Christmas late 1995 via police-business-local govt Safety Committee etc.
That’s just my former patch. There would be numerous local democratic problems resolved by the level of govt closest to the people. So yes democracy is expensive, but instability and a torn social fabric is alot more expensive.
There are right ways to amalgamate, but some of the Queensland amalgamations in the last five years were bloody stupid. Cairns Regional Council is one: a body consisting of Cairns and Port Douglas and a thin strip of 68 km of almost uninhabited Captain Cook Highway between them. They’re separate areas, and they should remain separate.
Tom McLoughlin Posted March 30, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Good points and I was going to remark earlier that, on reflection, I am not sure about the (fanciful) idea of abolishing the states so we have just two tiers of government. Given the frustrations of getting different levels of government to work together it seems attractive. But there would be a loss of democracy and representation and balance. I have never particularly bought into the obsessions with efficiency that gets so much airtime these days. More important is making the correct decisions and bringing people with those decisions.
On the other hand, in Australia with too many small councils we have a serious problem of lack of talent and experience in them. As some say, if you think our state government politicians are crap, just go look at the local councils! Run by a bunch of real estate speculators and used car salesmen.
i actually think that the situation with Clover Moore being both mayor and a state member of parliament is not a bad model. Though our absurd two-party partisan system works against co-operation. In fact in France it is very common for politicians to hold multiple offices. At first we anglos tend to think it is just some dodgy Latin practice but maybe not. Prior to becoming president Sarkozy was simultaneously a top minister in the national government and head of council of Hauts-de-Seine department; somewhere in there he was also mayor of Neuilly (in Hauts-de-Seine).
I suggest the reality is we won’t see much change – yes bigger Councils are (probably) more efficient, but they are also politically stronger. I expect this is something any State Government wouldn’t really be in favour of, even if the electorate was.
What we could look at instead is a “horses for course” approach. The old Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works at various times had responsibility for water, drainage and transport planning and land use planning. These are functions that are all eminently sensible to carry out at a City scale.
Collecting garbage and managing parks and libraries are things that can be done at pretty well any reasonable scale, especially since lots of it is contracted out nowadays.
I believe the biggest tension is in the planning space, where the desire to have all of the benefits we currently have locally, while making someone else take any disbenefits, will always create tensions. As there is a huge amount of give and take required in making these sorts of decisions, local parochialism will always be a barrier to achieving balanced outcomes.
I suggest we therefore need something like the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known a Metro Vancouver), which covers the metro area of Vancouver. This area has 24 local authorities containing about 2 million people.
Political leadership is provided by a Board of Directors drawn from elected officials appointed by their respective municipal councils. The number of directors/votes appointed from each local authority relates to its population.
Metro Vancouver is responsible for services (water, drainage, sewerage & garbage), policy (utilities, air quality, regional growth & strategies, regional parks) and acts as a political forum at the regional level. It has a $600m+ budget, with 80% coming from water & sewer charges and tipping fees.
The local authorities still have lots of local control, but integration of planning strategies and the argy bargy about competing spatial issues is carried out the Metro Vancouver level. Importantly, Metro Vancouver has a collaborative approach to planning.
Vancouver also has the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority (TransLink) that mainly manages public transport for Vancouver. The TransLink Board is appointed by the Mayor’s Council, and operates separately from the provincial (state) government, although it provides major capital funding. Interestingly, 50% of its funding comes from property and petrol taxes.
Reforming basic Government structures is probably too hard. Maybe we should look a new collaborative arrangements instead – but they will need real teeth.
Krammer: The sharper those teeth are though, the more threatening to State governments. AD
I think Krammer has put forth some pretty strong arguments here. Despite the “extra layer of bureaucracy” argument that is likely to come about, there are functions that a metropolitan council would perform best and there are functions that a local council would perform best.
I’d written some of this yesterday, but mustn’t have hit post before closing the browser window. Some functions of local councils would gain efficiency through amalgamation. transport infrastructure and wanted densities could be better organised through a metropolitan wide planning body. Garbage collection on the other hand, isn’t likely to become any more efficient. There are only so many houses a truck can drive past in a given day, and as pointed out, half of it is being contracted out to the same companies anyway.
Additionally certain local government functions help create the feel of local areas, and losing that might lead to more homogeneous suburbs. An obvious example is different local councils attitudes to graffiti. City of Yarra has a very different attitude to most the other local councils. As a result the suburb has a huge amount of street art, which then fuels a lot of the tourism for the area, and helps attract ‘youth’ and arts culture. That sort of policy however, is obviously not for everyone, which is precisely why its good that different councils have different policies. Under a large metropolitan council there might be ways to keep these sorts of different policies in place, assigning special policy zones, etc, but you can bet they would happen a lot less, with the same larger groups arguing, rather than lots of smaller groups with different opinions.
I’d like to see a metropolitan wide planning authority re-established. I’d make it up partially of planners appointed by the state government in the first instance, and then hopefully by the board itself in the longer term. The other part of the board would be made up of local council members appointed by the councils themselves. It would end up being a large and sometimes cumbersome board, however local councillors would only need to attend when matters concerning them were brought up. Which would result in a much more manageable size. This sort of board would hopefully have some experienced professionals involved, as well as democratic representation. The fact that local elections don’t all happen at once would also mean there is a level of stability that doesn’t exist at the State level, where planning issues are very much at the whim of election cycles.
IkaInk: Some interesting ideas there. I wonder if having smallish councils is important for place diversity? It’s the sort of issue I’d hope our universities might have done some research on e.g. has inner city Melbourne become more homogeneous as a result of Kennett abolishing small council’s like Fitzroy?
The MMBW is the obvious example. I don’t know much about it and the Wiki entry is disappointingly brief – who were the members? The Cumberland County Council set up in Sydney in 1944 would also have some interesting lessons. AD
The Cumberland County Council does seem to have some important lessons and the basic structure seems to mirror what I’ve suggested quite closely. I’ll have to do some more research on the CCC when I have the chance.
The MMBW is the obvious example, as it relates directly to Melbourne, but as far as I’ve been made to be aware the MMBW was entirely made up of “experts” and had no democratic representation.
The MMBW started 1896, built the sewerage system, then ran the water and sewerage, and after WWII, planning as well, such as it was- basically land use zoning. It was overseen by board members who were all appointed by govt., like all the other major infrastructure providers eg. Traffic Commission, Harbour Trust, Gas & Fuel, State Electricity, Victorian Railways Commission and Metropolitan Tramways. I think they were at first technocrats, and often had long-standing chairs or managers that sometimes stood up to government eg. Major-General Risson, chair of the tram board who argued against popular opinion to keep them in the 50s.
We dont need all of them back again, but I agree with Krammer and Ikaink (and myself in an earlier post) that some independent metro-wide commission or two with some democratic input would / could at least provide strong input, if not actually run things. The London Assembly seems to run this way, and sounds like Greater Vancouver does too. Now I think about it, the US is full of commissions that run things across boundaries, like school districts and especially public transport, sometime with representation from the councils involved. Take PT and metro planning out of their Ministerial hidey-holes and into the glare of independence and public scrutiny. The govt can always over-rule them if they want, but shouldnt be running them on an almost daily basis (see latest controversy over how no-go areas for windfarms were produced). Then there’s always VCAT which it seem can over-rule one of the few independent authorities left – the EPA !
PS there a chapter about the MMBW becoming a planning authority in Hugh Stretton’s seminal ‘Ideas for Australian Cities’, 2nd edition 1975.
It should be a priority to amalgamate the inner city local government areas of Melbourne to enable a sustainable growth in the city, that is currently forecast to grow to 5 million by the early 2020s.
The housing and employment of these extra 800,000+ residents will require the inner city to grow its resident population significantly above current planned numbers (especially if a large number are to be employed in the capital city zone that is concurrently introducing a large supply of additional commercial property for employers).
Current forecasts I have seen in ABS have the inner area of 10-11 LGAs population forecasts to increase by around 1%-1.5% over the next ten years, less than the state trend of 2% pa – when it should be housing above-trend to make use of existing infrastructure and closeness to residents’ place-of-work.
Over 70% of all ten inner city LGAs (excluding City of Melbourne) work outside their own area. Whereas the outer suburbs have much higher rates, some over 50% working in their own area (employment self-sufficiency).
On average 45% of residents of the three closest inner-city LGAs to Melbourne: Yarra (Richmond/Fitzroy), Stonnington (Prahran/Malvern) and Port Phillip (inc South Melbourne) work outside their own LGA, but within one of the other inner city LGAs (incl. Melbourne). 15% of Melbourne residents works in Yarra, Stonnington or Port Phillip.
None of this should be surprising, but these inner city suburbs need to be planned as part of the Capital City Area now. The narrow pot-hole-policy agendas currently debated and managed at a LGA level in inner Melbourne run counter to the huge transport, planning and economic challenges now heading its way. Integrated approaches to planning are slow to non-existent when independent differing views prevail.
If these four four LGAs were merged, they would represent a population of over 370,000 – which is not as ambitious ‘Doing a Brisbane’.
Further – the combined resources of the councils would be more efficient and have greater bargaining power with Spring Street (while still only have to manage an area smaller in square km than many outer suburban suburbs).
If the State Government doesn’t take this initiative, perhaps the LGAs should propose merging instead. What do you think of this?
I personally think if a sweeping reform like this is to take place, it should involve all 11 inner LGAs to the CBD (it will be another generation between reforms then) and create a Capital City Area which currently houses 1.2 million and has a high rate of local living/employment self sufficiency.
Interested in everyone else’s thoughts..
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