City Wrestles With Budget Challenges
By 250 News
Wednesday, November 04, 2009 04:12 AM
Prince George, B.C. - When the City of Prince George develops its budget for next year, don’t expect to see any requests for service enhancements on the books.
The City’s Finance and Audit Committee has already started looking at ways to trim costs at the City as contract agreements with employees are going to boost the operating costs again.
The bill for protective services in the City (Fire and police) is expected to add another 3.8% to the tax bill if staff can’t find cost savings elsewhere.
Chair of the Finance and Audit Committee Councillor Murry Krause says staff have a big job ahead of them “We’ve asked for them to find a million dollars in cuts. Certainly they’re taking our challenges to them very seriously in trying to assist us in trying to bring this (the budget) within our guidelines.”
Krause says the Committee is trying to trim back for several reasons “Its the economy, its acknowledging people are struggling, very often financially, and so there is isn’t an appetite for tax increases.”
Staff have already come up with some ideas, but in order to keep costs down, Krause says they may have to reduce staff “That is not a pleasant thing, but when your only source of income is land based taxation we know some people in our community are struggling, we’re going to make some really difficult decisions. Nobody wants to see people lose jobs, we want a strong stable workforce and we’ll continue to try and strive for that, but we have a hard budget coming in front of us very soon.”
Committee member, Councillor Cameron Stolz says City staff had already come up with nearly a million dollars in cost saving ideas, and have provided another million dollars worth of possible savings through suggested service reductions, cost cutting or revenue increasing ideas. Stolz says at this point, there are no plans to cut any existing jobs, but job vacancies may not be filled. He says another idea would look at retirements and not filling those positions. Staff also suggested reductions to things like, the flower basket program, banner program and production of a Leisure Services Guide. “They have looked at everything we’re doing right now to see if it is an item we need to maintain, for instance, there is a proposal to reduce the Council contingency fund by $25 thousand dollars this year.”
But if the City manages to trim enough to keep taxes in line, don’t be surprised to see user fees increase for garbage, sewer and water, all of which are running at a deficit and are supposed to be self sufficient.
The Finance and Audit Committee has a couple of months to hammer out some ideas, the first budget meeting is set for February 8th.
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Posted by: acrider54 on November 4 2009 5:47 AM
Start with the new communications position. Never should have happened in the first place. A couple of weeks later and the City is crying poverty. That was known all along. Who dropped the ball on this one is still a mystery, sort of.