By Doug Draper
It used to be that municipal council’s would typically approve budgets with the highest cost increases they felt they could get away with in the first year following a municipal election.
Niagara regional government's corporate services commissioner Brian Hutchings
From my more than 30 years of following municipal budgets, there appeared to be at least two reasons for this.
First, you have councillors wanting to deliver on all the promises they made to voters during the election. And second, more than a few municipal councillors have confessed over the ages that if they are going to approve a big budget hike, they would rather do it in the first year of a council term than in the last year when they have to once again face the electorate.
Those days seem to be all but gone though as more property taxpayers let their councillors know they’ve had it with taxes increases and this year, the regional council seems close to delivering a budget that will add up to little or no increase in taxes.
At a committee-of-the-whole meeting this January 29, the regional government’s corporate services commissioner Brian Hutchings outlined an operating budget for 2011 that so far keeps any increase over last year down to 1.2 per cent – already below a cap the council set of 1.4 per cent before councillors get into any further cutting before a final budget is approved later this winter.That is the case even though some regional bodies, including the police, are tabling budgets for 2011 significantly above the 1.4-per cent cap. Furthermore, the figures Hutchings rolled out show that the increasing in operating costs is actually closer to six per cent. The only thing that drove it down was more than $14 million of social service costs the province has taken over from the regional government.
Some councillors, including Bill Hodgson from Lincoln, Dave Eke from Niagara-on-the-Lake and Andy Petrowski from St. Catharines, argued that the region should be doing more to cut its own costs and giving the $14 million save from the uploading of services back to the taxpayers.
Hodgson warned that there is no guarantee whatsoever that the regional government can count on more uploading of services from the province next year, in which case the council could be facing a budget increase well above its spending cap.
The region’s budget meetings continue into February and include a special presentation and question-and-answer session for the public at the McBain Community Centre in Niagara Falls starting at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 9.
For more details on the budget and upcoming budget meetings, visit the regional government’s website at http://www.niagararegion.ca and click on government and follow the links.
(Visit Niagara At Large at http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater Niagara region.)
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