By Anne Finlay-Stewart

Tom Thomson Art Gallery

• Creativity at the Gallery is not limited to the art on the walls. Its partnership with ROOTS in its Tom Thomson line has been bringing in $3-4000 a month, and consideration is being given to expanding the offerings to include canoe and kayak paddles. The full budget has yet to be approved by the Gallery board, but the city's share of $282, 470 will be slightly less than a third of the operating budget.

Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library

• The Library's budget too is the responsibility of an independent board which represents its three member communities – Owen Sound, Chatsworth and Georgian Bluffs. Although its staffing levels per open hours are among the lowest in the province, the draft budget does not include staffing increases. Contractual increases follow the city's non-union salary and benefit process.

Ironically, the technology that vastly improves customer service also cuts revenues as patrons are able to renew books on-line and avoid fines!

Owen Sound Billy Bishop Regional Airport

• The city tried to divest itself of this asset some time ago without success. Day-to-day operations are contracted out to a consortium of individuals, and there are some off-setting revenues from leases and a percentage of sales of aviation sales. Watch this one – multi-million dollar upgrades to the runways will be needed, likely in the term of this council.

Transit

• Council had agreed to keep the city bus terminal open until at least spring, with public consultation about its future. Cuts in the 2015 draft budget and an in camera meeting on the subject scheduled for January 26 suggest this is no longer on the table.
• The proposed $180,000 budgeted for fuel will be revisited in consideration of the new smaller, more fuel-efficient city buses.
• The cost of specialized transit will increase this year, with greater use and reduced user fees to comply with the Accessibility for the Ontarians with Disabilities Act. While Counciller Scott Greig wanted to publicize that it was the "province's fault we have to spend $100,000," it is quite possible to understand this as the province making accessibility a priority for its citizens.

Public Works

• The position of Manager of Public Works has been vacant for most of 2014, and the Operations Advisory Committee will review the elimination of this position for a budget reduction of $100,000.

Winter Control

• This huge, unpredictable and unavoidable expense is ...well, huge, unpredictable and unavoidable. No doubt it will continue to be an ongoing subject for discussion.

Compostable Waste

• Director of Operations Ken Becking says compostable waste represents about 30 per cent of household waste. Meaford collects this waste and takes it to a composting facility in Arthur for a $2-per-tonne tipping fee. The facility in turn sells the composted product. Any changes to our current collection would require consideration before the city begins negotiations with its contractors.

- Director of Finance Wayne Ritchie held up some warning flags. There is no proposed contribution to reserves for replacing waste collection vehicles, and the waste system is heavily subsidized by the general taxpayers – user fees (bag tags) have not been revisited for some time.

Solar

- The process of adding solar panels to the city's assets is moving slowly. So far we have panels selling power to the grid on the public works building and at the soccer complex.

Water

- Owen Sound residents pay for the volume of water they use and waste water is billed as a surcharge on top of that. This keeps the system operating on a sustainable basis – a recommendation of Justice O'Connor after to the Walkerton water enquiry. We have a watermain still in operation that was built in 1875, and we are facing large and ongoing maintenance bills long into the future, according to Ken Becking.

City Hall

- While we have heritage buildings in Owen Sound that have stood for a century and more, our fifty-year-old city hall is facing the end of its designed life. It was not constructed to present-day standards, with single-pane windows and virtually no insulation. Look for some plans to appear in the capital budget to come in February.

Police building, Bayshore and Rec Centre

- Operating budgets for these buildings contain some high and growing utility bills - $92,000 a year for electricity in the police building and $216,000 in the Bayshore. Besides the escalating cost of energy, staff identified last year that we have a poor handle on usage and virtually no plans for conservation.

Parks

- It costs $1-million dollars a year to maintain 500 acres of parkland spread over 48 Owen Sound parks.

So far in the budget process more than $421,000 in savings have been found, bringing the net increase in property taxes down to 2.5 per cent if Grey County and the school boards hold the line on their own increases, or as low as 2.1 per cent if the County is able to reduce taxes by one per cent.

Council closed this week's deliberations with a motion requesting managers try to find further potential savings. Revised budgets and the capital budget will be considered by council at meetings, open to the public, on February 13 and 18.

Anne Finlay-Stewart is Community Editor of Owensoundhub.org. She can be reached at [email protected].