City council wrapped up deliberations on the city’s first multi-year budget Nov. 9.
“Budget is always really hard,” said Chestermere Mayor Patricia Matthews.
City staff have been working hard to prepare budget documents for 2017 and 2018.
“We’re pretty excited about it,” said Chestermere Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Dr. Randy Patrick.
“There aren’t too many communities our size that do that kind of thing yet,” he said.
The goal of the multi-year budget is to eventually get to a four-year budgeting cycle.
Based on the city’s strategic plan, administration have developed the budget package to present to city council that reflects where the city wants be.
“The multi-year budgeting really gives us the ability to look into the future,” said Patrick.
This look forward gets staff thinking about the challenges and opportunities presented by future city plans.
“It really gives us the ability to better plan and to give better advice to council,” he said.
The proposed tax rate increase for the two-year budget is 2.3 per cent for 2017 and a 2 per cent increase for 2018.
“First and foremost council are people and so you can empathize with what people want to see in their community and you have to balance that with fiscal responsibility that doesn’t over tax them,” she said.
These rates may change after staff makes changes as directed by council before the final budget is passed in December.
“We only control the municipal portion of taxes…but we are aware that there’s a good chunk of it that is provincial too,” she said, “and it’s the bottom line that people have to pay.”
The budget meetings started Nov. 8 with a presentation to council detailing how the city calculates mill rates and property assessments and how they relate to each other.
This was followed by presentations by staff detailing their budget needs for the 2017-2019 budget period.
Deliberations began on Nov. 9 staff gave a condensed version of the budget process followed by capital projects that are new to this budget.
The repeat of the presentation was primarily for the benefit of any members of the public if they chose to attend the meetings. Unfortunately, Matthews didn’t see anyone from the community in the gallery for the budget deliberations.
“It was really disappointing,” she said.
She realizes that people are busy which is why council and staff chose to book the deliberations for the afternoon and evening.
“We get it…all of us work day jobs,” said Matthews, “its why we ran the debate part of this in the evening, so that people could come and hear us have the…sometimes loud discussion that we did.”
She is hoping that residents will give their feedback on why they didn’t attend.
“What is it we could be doing to get more people involved,” she said.
Both administration and council are looking for public input on the process so that they can work to improve it in future years.
“We want active feedback on the process,” said Matthews.
Despite the lack of engagement from the community, Matthews is happy with council’s debate over the budget.
“We debated everything from $5000 laser guns to $42,000 trailers to million-dollar equipment,” she said, “all of it is evaluated.”
As part of the process any projects and expenses are being moved out into later years in the budget.
“This budget is shaved significantly,” said Matthews.
This has been done in response to the current economic conditions.
“We want to make sure that we are keeping taxes as low as possible while still providing people with quality service,” she said.
The new capital projects kicked off both the debate and questions by council of city staff on the second day of deliberations.
“Staff did, I think, an excellent job of responding to the concerns and questions that council had and we had quite a lot of them,” said Matthews.
One contentious issue for council involved paths and parkways in the city.
“We had a great deal of contention and discussion and debate and a little bit of argument about the proposed capital upgrades for the off-leash area on the north end of the lake,” she said.
There was also a long conversation about flood controls for the future.
Despite the “robust” discussions, as Matthews described it, decisions were not made in the meeting.
“That will be done in council,” she said.
Issues that a consensus could not be reached on during the budget meetings will be brought forward again by staff in a regular council meeting in December.
The Mayor and council will again debate the issues and make binding decisions at that time.
After the budget meetings wrapped up, Matthews said that the majority of the budget is complete.
CAO Patrick beliefs there is only about 10 per cent of the work left for staff to complete.
“As you can imagine a two-year budget is not a small undertaking for a community of 20,000 people,” said Matthews.
“There’s going to be learnings along the way,” she said.
Council only has a few line items, such as the off-leash area that sparked such fierce debate, to debate again in December.
Council also instructed staff to explore whether regional partnerships and partnerships with groups in the city could be created to save tax payers money.
Matthews suggested an example of how partnerships could be made for disaster response and flood control.
“For instance, we might buy the hose and Strathmore might buy the generator and then if Strathmore is in a disaster situation we would tool out the hose,” said Matthews, “if we were in a disaster situation and needed a back-up generator they would bring us the back up.”
Other cost saving measures discussed included whether the city should lease or buy new fleet vehicles.
“We heard very clearly, in this particular environment buying is significantly less expensive than leasing it,” said Matthews.
Some of the city’s bigger equipment are reaching the end of their service life.
Matthews beliefs that all the projects and items included in the budget are part of the city’s needs and that there aren’t any wants included in it.
“This budget allows Chestermere to continue to be the beautiful place that we all want to live in and still keeps the impact of taxes down and quite low,” said Matthews.
To view the presentation documents or give feedback go to http://www.chestermere.ca.
