The following is a transcription of Mayor Ian Boddy's comments at today's budget meeting which he referred to as his "annual whine".

"This'll be my twelfth budget. It's at least my ninth that I've carped about “we need growth”.

Now back in the 60s, my father's era, they built out the water and the wastewater treatment plant for 45,000 people, because we're going to build. And over the years councils have constantly made decisions that we can afford this because we're going to grow, and we're going to get there.

You know even bus shelters that were very nice a couple of years ago, now we're trying  to figure out how the heck we're going to pay to clean them. So every time we've added something, whether it be a rec centre, whether it be bus shelters, art galleries, art gallery expansions, all these things that we want to have, clearly, once you add them it's impossible to remove them.

You know, we're going to have to make some tough decisions here, and Carol's [Councillor Merton] just hit a point of trying to protect those people that maybe are at the lower income or can't afford it. How do you do that?

So here we have a tax rate that's more than double our neighbours, and year after year I keep saying we need to grow, we need to be prosperous. We need industry. We need jobs. We need commercial.

You know if Port Elgin hits whatever number they're going to hit and that's where the population is and that's certainly where the income is per population, why would any commercial person establish in Owen Sound? You know once a Home Depot or whatever the other big one is start to look at it and they go to Port Elgin, we start going the other way [indicates downward spiral]. But year after year after year after year after year we put nothing into trying to attract new assessment. One percent set aside for “Prosperous City”.

And I keep being told by certain people that “oh don't worry about what Port Elgin's doing, because they've got this. Don't worry about what the Town of Blue Mountains is doing because they've got that.”

And yet here we sit, we do nothing. We don't have an economic development department really any more; we've got a marketing department but it's more looking at events and things which are important but can we even afford to use those events frankly when we'e charging four thousand per household when the average around us is half of that?

You know, we need to make tough decisions and we look at the budget this time of year and say gee, we've got to figure out how do we get that down to such and such a percentage and then the rest of the year we say yes to all kinds of little things that we can add in services because it's nice to do and that's what we want to do and that's the way we want to get.

But until we start to put money into trying to attract industry, attracting jobs, and attracting commercial that can succeed...You know a lot of the commercial write down probably is still the effect of Target from a few years ago bailing on retail, as well as ...Amazon does not pay taxes, Netflix does not pay taxes, where Blockbuster, etc used to. So that's going to continue to change which makes it hard to try to figure out how to put money into commercial without changing it.

But at some point we've got to get serious about growing this city...or not. But if not then I feel like I've wasted eleven or twelve years of my life. Because we keep talking about it but nothing happens, and here we are with another annual report of how we're taking an absolute kicking in growth by everybody around us and we do nothing about it.

So that's my frustration point. If I have anything to with next year's budget for 2023, we'll probably he here getting the same speech with nothing happening. But maybe I won't be here by then. Thanks.

At the end of the budget meeting, Boddy said “If we want to have riders on our buses, then we have to have more people living here. If we want to start lowering taxes, and other things we want to do, we have to start attracting investment.”

He moved the following motion: “That we request a report from our City Manager as to how we can facilitate an investment attraction and retention plan, without hiring new staff or increasing budget.”

The motion passed unanimously in a recorded vote.

Further reading:  Mayor's Growth Plan working group goes public