On Tuesday, Guelph City Council will hold the final vote on the 2019 budget. Likely, they will hold multiple final votes as various councillors offer increased spending for a variety of priorities or offer cuts or deferments in order to save money.
If council votes for the budget as it’s presented right now by the staff, it will be an increase of 3.93 per cent. That includes, the base budget, the local boards and shared services budget, and all the expansions requested by various departments.
In “pocket book” terms, that’s about $17 or $18 more per month on your property taxes.
On top of the budget brought forward by staff, or in lieu of some of the proposed expansions, expect councillors to ask for money for affordable housing, an increase to the Community Wellbeing grant, and a cut to proposed increases in fees for municipal parking lots.
On top of that, Mayor Cam Guthrie will be following up on a number of his initiatives to deal with homelessness, but those numbers are in the air as he tries to seek funding from elsewhere.
At the end of the day though, one thing is certain: The city budget is going up. Not down.
I went to a town hall hosted by the Ward 6 councillors last Thursday with some expectation that there would be, at least, a little bit of friction. Some of the most expensively assessed land in Guelph is in the south end, so property tax increases hit them the hardest.
Instead, I was surprised by the resignation. One woman said that she feels like it’s “death by a thousand cuts,” with tax increases year over year, but then she relayed a story about seeing a man run down Arthur Street in bare feet the week before.
Mayor Guthrie, who was at the town hall, added that he himself is uncomfortable with the 3.93 per cent increase, but said that there’s only so much you can do before you start cutting services.
You may say fine, but there’s two main drivers for budget increases from one year to the other; one is an increase in compensation – salary and benefits to staff – and the other is keeping service levels exactly where they are in a city that keeps adding 2 per cent more people every year.
Pat Fung, a chartered accountant well known for watching the nickels and dimes at City Hall, has said he thinks that council can cut between five and 10 per cent just by trimming “the fat.” Of course, I’ve heard Mr. Fung suggest cutting the whole communications department at City Hall in the past, so his definition of “fat” may not be yours or mine.
Any politician, no matter their political stripes, does not like having to vote for tax increases. Even if their reasons are just purely based on political self-interest, no one wants to go back to their constituents and say, “Yes, I voted to take more of your money,” even if it’s in the name of this common good called “government”.
Similarly, no one wants to start cutting either. This can also be tough to explain to constituents, and “austerity”, as a political term, is about as popular as “tax hike”, which is why no one runs on “austerity”. They run on “efficiencies”.
And the thing with efficiencies is that there sometimes isn’t as much of them as you think. If there’s one thing that the service reviews and internal audits have proven so far, it’s that the City of Guelph runs a pretty tight ship.
Of course, you can point to examples like District Energy, or recycling contracts with solid waste, but on the basis of the day-to-day function of city business, auditors within and without City Hall all say that citizens are getting appropriate value for dollar when it comes to services.
While it’s an ongoing affair to make sure we’re squeezing every dollar for the maximum amount of juice, or where ever this metaphor is supposed to go, what if, in the end, the squeeze isn’t enough?
It’s not inconceivable, as Mr. Fung pointed out, that too many people might start feeling the squeeze themselves with three per cent increases per year to the city budget being more than routine. That $216 average annual increase becomes $1,000 in less than five year, which does make affordability more difficult for some.
Still, cities remain down river from all other levels of government, and while deficit spending in the tough times is an option for the federal government and the province, cities are barred by law from running red ink.
All the same, it doesn’t stop the higher levels of government from downloading services or forcing cities to hold out for the slim hope of more money for specific initiatives, and then regulating tightly the terms by which cities can apply. They call cities engines of our economy, but they don’t allow cities to serve as their own engineers.
So like all budgets, Tuesday’s will be a statement about what council wants to make a priority, but we should remember that there’s some real limitations in terms of what they can do.
