By Lara Fominoff @LaraFominoff on Twitter

Tax increase projected at 1.96 per cent after Finance Committee passes 2019-2022 Operating Budget

Nov 24, 2018 | 5:06 PM

LETHBRIDGE – After six days of deliberation, debate and some divisiveness, the city’s Finance Committee has passed the $380 million 2019-2022 Operating Budget by a vote of 7-2, with Councillors Joe Mauro and Blaine Hyggen voting against it. The budget will now go to City Council for approval at Monday’s regular meeting. 

Committee Chair Ryan Parker says at the end of the day, he feels good about the work the committee accomplished, with a fair and transparent process.

“I’m really glad, even though it was a little longer than what we expected, we did it properly and that’s the most important thing.”

The final projected tax increase is expected to be 1.96 per cent, or 7.84 per cent over four years. A directional resolution was passed instructing City Manager Bramwell Strain to, over the course of his review, potentially find ways of lowering taxation by one to two percent. 

“I am very encouraged by the review process,” he said. “I do think that we’ll find a lot of efficiencies and a lot of very important points for council to ponder on, as we move forward.”

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Several items were also referred for consideration by the Finance Committee at a later date. Strain says he doesn’t expect those items to impact taxation.

“That’s not the intent. The intent was for the reviews to find either efficiencies or I call them reinvestment opportunities. So look at the money you have and how you spend it. So I believe the intent is to hold right where they were at.” 

At the beginning of budget deliberations, $6.225 million dollars from the provincially funded Municipal Revenue Stabilization Reserve (MRSR) was available, intended for one-time or short-term use, that the committee could draw from, rather than directly taking money from city tax sources. Three million dollars of it was immediately set aside as reserve, while the other have was available for budget items. 

The Committee actually approved more than $3.225 million dollars and ended up over by $644,000. However Strain says that overage will come out of the MRSR reserve funds once City Council passes the budget.  

The most money approved in the budget went to Lethbridge Police Services to establish a Community Peace Officer program, for the Ambassador Watch Program and for a Police and Crisis Team. Mayor Chris Spearman says he believes LPS is now well-resourced.

“Right now, we’ve asked them to be innovative. We’ve supported their requests for innovation for the most part on our highest priority items. And there will be a review process that will take place by Nov. 2020 where we will see what the effect of the effect of these new initiatives is.”

Councillor Joe Mauro was critical of the choice to fund LPS an additional $2 million per year in their base budget, introducing a directional resolution to remove one-million of the two million dollars from it. The motion was defeated 5-4. 

He also told the committee that while he was glad to be part of the budget process and initially excited about it, that changed through the week.

“To be honest with you, this process actually was a bit of a disappointment for me. We talked about transparency, we talked about being more open, we talked about trying to save money, we pretty much demanded that everybody bite the bullet…We, in my mind, have become less transparent. We, in my mind, have muddied the waters.” 

In the end, said Spearman, the committee had to make some tough choices. 

“I think in some cases we challenged the status quo, and we had to decide between what was absolutely necessary and thing that would be nice to have. If we can generate some savings from the review down the road, we can look at some additional initiatives. But we want to be sensitive also that there’s a limit to how much people can pay in taxes.”