Town presents business plans,budget
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The Town of Tillsonburg received the budget report from director of finance, Darrell Eddington at Monday night’s council meeting.
Eddington presented highlights of the report - a combination of four open council meetings held February 4, 12, 14 and 20, 2013.
“On February 4, we reviewed two particular communication documents, one is a budget guide as well as a business plan and highlights. Those documents have been refreshed and are ready to be published,” Eddington said during his presentation to council.
The director of finance noted that at the moment, the draft budget is an overall reduction of almost $100,000 or minus 0.8 percent (in the requirement from taxation) and is a little under $12,392,000.
The reduction pertains to operating requirements and there is no increase in capital requirements for this year (2013)
There have been a number of pressures that have impacted the budget in 2013 he noted, including Omers benefit increase ($103, 500), a 1 percent economic adjustment to wage grids ($72,400), three additional full-time employees (FTE’s) ($97, 200), wage grid movements ($57,600). Also included in the budget is eight months of IT support ($40,000), health benefits at a 5 percent increase ($28,000), insurance costs had no budget impact, urban design reserve ($25,000). In addition, OPP contract budget increase ($55,000); actual contract increase $264,000, fire communications lost contract revenue ($120,000), physician recruitment ($5,000), contribution to reserves for youth activities ($5,000), fire fighter association renegotiation – amount not yet known, and sustaining existing service delivery.
“All total, all these pressures that have been aggregated, or offset, mitigated - $759,000, particularly due to the Special Events Centre sale and transfer of the library to the County. Those are the two big items that are a part of that reduction,” explained Eddington.
When the presentation was complete, Eddington and staff recommended that the budget, at $12,391,879 be adopted.
The mayor then opened it up for council discussion and input.
Several councillors made positive remarks concerning this year’s budget and discussions.
“I think it was a very good budget process this year, it ran extremely smooth and we accomplished a lot of things in a short period of time,” said deputy mayor Mark Renaud. Mayor John Lessif was also very pleased with the entire process and overall Tillsonburg budget.
“Council was very much engaged in the whole (budget) process, which I thank you for and staff collectively, as a team listened to our input and the challenges that we presented to the staff to get to where we are today,” said Lessif. “We continue to have challenges – policing costs being one of them, funding being reduced is another one.
The mayor also noted the positive results.
“When you look at 2012, as we did in 2011, we were able to reduce the debt, grow reserves and not increase our debt level,” he added.
“The community’s not standing still, we’re still moving forward, we’re still reinvesting in the community with tax dollars - is it as much as we’d like, no, but we’re going in the right direction,” said Lessif. “I’m pretty pleased with the results with the budget that we’ve ended up delivering to the taxpayer.”
For more information or a copy of the budget documents visit www.tillsonburg.ca or the Town of Tillsonburg’s corporate office.