Finance and Audit looking at 8.19%

“I imagine that I’m going to be able to find areas that I believe that we should be able to trim. Similar to last year when I when I was identifying some places, I thought we should be able to make some cuts in order to find some savings. So I don’t have the book yet, but my anticipation is that I’m not going to be settling on an 8.1 or whatever the committee is bringing forward the Council.”

When the budget winds up before Council in late January, it can look at some deferral options. One of them is to dip into the snow control reserve to cut the snow budget. A Transit reserve fund is also an option. But the one deferral that garners the most debate is the Safe Restart dollars, money that was given to municipalities during COVID. “While our revenues took a hit and while there was sort of financial uncertainty within the world, we were able to use this money to help out our tax levy a bit and then council in 2021 use that money, I believe, exactly as it was intended,” explains Dalio.

“They passed a 3% increase, but they really used the safe restart money to bring it down to a zero. But it is a one time funding that you can use that is one day going to run out.” Those dollars were used in the past two budgets to ease the tax burden. Sampson didn’t support the use of those dollars and he won’t again.

“Seeing how we can bring down the tax rate, but we’re not bringing it down or simply just kicking it down the road further and then causing that pain later. And so I’m not really in favour of doing that. I wasn’t last year. I’m going to vote against it this year if it’s proposed because I don’t think it’s a solution. “

A tax increase of seven percent would mean the City would only have to trim $260,000 . Drop to a four percent tax hike would result in cutting $3.8 in services.

by Cheryl Jahn

Finance and Audit looking at 8.19%

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