Ian Boddy, Mayor of Owen Sound, delivered theese remarks on the City's 2023 budget with the lowest tax increase in 12 years:

The goal of every municipal government is to provide the best services and infrastructure for its residents that the community can afford. The foundation for providing good services is building a strong tax base. To have and maintain a strong tax base, assessment grownth needs to meet or exceed annual inflation.

While determining what the community can afford may be subjective, relevant data is available and can provide information for comparison to other similar municipalities.

We know that in comparison to other regional, annd similar communities in Ontario, our tax base has been high, while our average income base has been low. We have to maintain reasonable tax increases to maintain the services provided, while other municipalities catch up, so we can be attractive to tax payers looking to invest here.

To maintain assessment growth, a municipality must continuously prosper. It must retain and attract commercial, industrial and service investment that provides jobs. It must have a labour force to attract that investment and to fill those jobs. It must have sufficient housing for that labour force.

In order to attract new housing, commercial, industrial and service investment, a municipality needs to be more attractive than other municipalities competing to attract the same investment.

Once we build a consistently strong tax base, our community can lower taxes and afford to increase thequantity and quality of services it provides to its citizens.

We have worked towards lower tax increases the past few years. Taking advantage of that tax assessment growth we have been striving for allows us to bring in this low increase this year, and gives us a big boost in getting our tax rates down towards a mid range relative to others.

Congratulations and thanks to City staff and to my fellow councillors for the effort to get here.