The first budget developed by Mayor Colleen Smook and the council elected last fall – and also this spring – has a little bit of everything: a tax increase, a fee decrease, reduced services and transfers to other organizations, increased overall spending. As such, it’s hard to say exactly what kind of a budget it is. Tax and spend? Cuts and austerity? A stimulus budget? There are elements of each.
The bad news and the good news for residential taxpayers are two sides of the same coin. On the negative side, taxes are going up, but at the same time, they are not going up by much, about one per cent for a $200,000 home after education property tax rebate, or $32 a year. But at the same time, the city no longer has a pool and there will be reductions to outdoor skating rink and perhaps wading pool hours, fewer seasonal public works employees during the summer construction and paving season and people who put on community events that had all of their facility and equipment rental fees forgiven in the past will now be paying at least part of those fees and extra staff costs incurred as well. Residents may not be paying the price when property taxes are due at the end of September, but they’ll be paying the price elsewhere, such as in not having summer day camps to send their children too or maybe not being able to get hold of someone at the community centre front desk because hours are being reduced. If you aren’t a gym pass holder and want to use the fitness centre, you will have to work around the reception desk’s schedule in the future.
Admittedly, there isn’t a lot of room to make cuts in the budget to hold taxes steady. More than three-quarters of the nearly $35 million that the city is planning to spend this year is already accounted for by salaries and benefits, the cost of contracting the RCMP and the need to pay back previous borrowing. The only one of these that can be expected to go down at the best of times would be the debenture payments, but they aren’t likely to go down much during this term of council because of borrowing to pay for the construction of the new sewage treatment plant.
That sewage treatment plant is probably the brightest spot in the budget, which revealed that less than half of the city’s one-third share of the costs – $12,167,000 in total – will have to be borrowed, thanks to a grant and transfers from the general operating and utility reserves. This means that instead of paying 81 cents per foot of property frontage and 58 additional cents per cubic metre of water consumed for the next 25 years or until the debt is paid off, property owners and utility customers will only be paying half of that. On the other hand, the transfer from the general operating reserve was basically paid for by underspending last year, when less than $29 million was spent out of a total budget estimated to come to about $31.75 million.
Perhaps the biggest curiosity about this budget is the fact that revenues and expenditures have ballooned from under $32 million in 2018 to nearly 10 per cent more. Usually when times are tough, governments cut back their spending. But perhaps the plan is to generate another surplus over the year so that even more money from the reserve can be applied to the costs of the sewage treatment plant. If so, that would be wise, if only because it will free up borrowing space for the next quarter century and, given the state of much of Thompson’s infrastructure, capital improvements are going to require that space.
