Last Night's Budget Input Session

I had my kick at the can last night and stumbled through a presentation. Luckily I had a written submission that was made available to all the Council and the 2 other taxpayers that came. There was one member of the Media, Mr. Richard Rolke from the Vernon Morningstar.
Most of the important part of the submission can be found at Don Quixote Budget Submission Tomorrow at 5:30

I identified several areas where I thought there was room to lower our taxes and hopefully the Council will closely examine these areas before committing to a final budget:

• $29,000 worth of "soft or double counted costs" in the Land Committee Budget
• $300,000 in Airport Reserve provision and whether this could be better financed (if proven necessary by a business plan) by borrowing and spreading costs over the lifetime of the asset. (same argument re $1,100,000 in 2008-2011 for runway extension?).
• Apparently the $113,333 left in the Airport Reserve at 2006 year end was actually only until Nov.30 and there has been some more capital expenses made in December reducing this amount available.
• I had estimated that there would be $100,000 in profit from the Airport operations after backing out the amortization. ($65,000 to close of 2005 and about $35,000 for 2006 as an estimated profit). I was informed last night that a prelim look at the Airport books showed a flat 2006 and no substantial profit. However that does still leave the $65,000 from prior years to factor into this years budget.
• The 2007 intended reserve in the POLICING RESERVE was confirmed at $1,218,180 . I made the submission that this should be drawn on and reduced to the originally proposed level from the 2.84% staff budget of 1,000,000. This would give us $218,180 worth of budget room.
• The $96,500 that comes from the Light Utility class ratio increase that will be used to reduce the Business class ratio. (i.e Revenue Neutral and no benefit to taxpayer) was a source of questioning by Coun. Nichol.
• The use of $100,400 for a project along 29th st and whether we were simply building "a road to nowhere" seems like an area that will be further debated. I must remind council that this is being financed from existing reserves and would have no effect on this years tax rates.
• Coun. Cochrane expressed some misgivings with the 1% departmental cuts that were made and the service levels that could be effected. He thought that there was enough room in the areas that I had identified to ensure that some of these cuts that could come back to bite the city should be restored. He seemed to be most worried about material type cuts in the Public works department like $3000 reduction in sidewalk grinding and slower service at tax time in accounting department. These are relatively small items. A good portion of the 1% in salary costs in the departments was accomplished by simply lowering the original built in CPI rate of 3% down to the actual CPI rate of1.6%
• There is no extra windfall from the Terasen Gas franchise fee. The $570,000 was confirmed as in line with the budgeted amount.

Remember 1%= $148,869 (CALL IT $150,000)

29,000 +300,000+65,000+218,000 = $612,000 or about 4.08%

The Council will probably examined the budget in light of all the public input (sarcasm intended) at the next council meeting. Hopefully we will see a reduction if not an elimination of this tax increase.