City administration found nearly $200,000 in savings during the 2024 budget discussions to help lessen the tax hike, with the changes focused on decreasing some expenses and increasing some revenues.
Administration reviewed the operating budget for “material changes” that could potentially affect the proposed mill rate increase and found four areas totalling $185,921 that would reduce the tax hike by 0.53 per cent while maintaining most programs and services in the budget.
After factoring in this reduction, council still landed on a municipal tax hike of 7.6 per cent.
After finalizing the transit equipment reserve budget, department staff performed extra due diligence on it, resulting in changes to reserve contributions; the savings amounted to $38,314.
The legal services department reviewed its fee recoveries for work the solicitor’s office performs for capital projects and third-party groups and reviewed the projects it could perform in-house. This resulted in a determination that it could increase fee recoveries by $30,000.
The solicitor’s office reviewed the potential money it could collect in 2024 from parking enforcement, specifically, the more than $1 million in outstanding tickets floating around since 2011. This resulted in a revised estimate of how much extra the department believes it can collect — $65,000 — this year.
Administration also reviewed how much it spent on education programs and meetings for city council members and city staff and determined it should roll back those costs to 2023 totals of $52,607. This is broken down into $13,367 for council and $39,240 for city hall departments.
When asked how administration had determined the $65,000 amount for parking enforcement collection, city solicitor Andrew Svenson said there wasn’t an “exact science” behind it. Instead, his department looked at the overall outstanding amounts yet to be claimed while considering the collection efforts that staff plan to implement in January.
“You’ll see a towing bylaw presented to start more aggressively enforcing (ticket collection). And we are hopeful that will stir up additional voluntary payments and that people will pay what they owe for parking violations,” he said.
Svenson added that the department had originally hoped to collect $200,000 in outstanding parking tickets in 2024 but will now focus on attempting to acquire $265,000.
Council then voted unanimously to approve the financial changes that city administration recommended.
