- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor
Owen Sound City Councillor Scott Greig made a "notice of motion" at the last council meeting. Greig said he will bring forward a motion on April 24 "that in preparing the 2018 budget for deliberation by council that the municipal levy increase be no more than 2.5% over the budget of 2017".
Sounds good. Definitely a popular pre-election year proposal. But can – or should - taxes be held to an arbitrary number?
In the discussion around the 2017 budget, Councillor Jim McManaman spoke against this "magic number" approach to the process. Citing the city roads alone – one third or more of which are in poor condition or at risk of failure – McManaman said it would take over 100 years to repair them at the current levels of capital funding committed to the project. He admitted that he had, in the past, voted for a budget cut to keep taxes below an arbitrary number that Council believed residents would accept. But McManaman acknowledged that this approach has brought us to the infrastructure deficits we have today, and his own thinking has changed with experience.
Some big expenses are a result of delaying or cheaping out on maintenance, or inadequacies in original designs, or simply the passage of time. City Hall may be a bit of each of those – the 10th Street Bridge is almost certainly the latter. The Wastewater Treatment Plant is definitely a change in acceptable standards over time. Whatever the cause, there is simply no cheap solution, nor any way of avoiding the inevitable.
Operating expenses are a different kind of challenge. Insurance, fuel, materials, vehicles, mandatory benefits, negotiated contracts – all of these costs rise somewhat unpredictably, often based on factors completely beyond municipal control.
Much, maybe most, of what the City does is regulated either under the Ontario Municipal Act or a myriad of other pieces of provincial and federal legislation that govern clean water, emergency services, health, safety, heritage and planning. Money that comes from those same "upper tiers" is often tied to specific services – a large portion of the gas tax transfer is to be used for public transit, for example.
The rest of our money- for everything we need - comes from property taxes, licences and fees.
For years our Owen Sound taxation was heavily unbalanced – industrial and commercial taxpayers were paying a higher proportion in order to keep residential taxpayers (need I say voters?) happy.
Did high commercial taxes drive businesses away? We'll never really know.
The City of Owen Sound spent a great deal of staff and council time in 2016, reviewing the services it provides. They asked the public their opinion. They looked at the airport, parks, roads, elections, benefits and more, and were able to identify almost $815,000 in savings over approximately two years. And still the tax bill rose, for all the reasons above.
At the same time, Council voted to put water and sewer services into Sydenham Heights – the land we annexed years ago, just south of the hospital. They also took a gamble that giving developers a moratorium on development charges, and forgoing that $600,000 or so, would spur growth in our residential tax base. Has it? Would those homes be built anyway? Only the developers know, and they aren't likely to tell.
Two of our three most experienced councillors voted against extending the cheerfully named "holiday" on development charges. They were out-voted by the rest of the councillors and the mayor, and whatever gain there may be in the long run, the loss of revenue will last until the end of this council's term.
The lines between maintaining and investing, holding the line and cutting, responsibility and popularity are extraordinarily fine. Our neighbours in Meaford learned what happens when the pleasure of several years of tax freezes becomes the pain of double-digit increases, big debt and deteriorating infrastructure.
Every decision has a cost, now or later. This council has one more budget to approve to demonstrate that they can walk those lines.
