Prince George Budget Discussion Starts Today
By 250 News
Wednesday, February 09, 2011 04:10 AM
Prince George, B.C. – The City of Prince George will start its budget deliberations with City Council this afternoon.
Mayor Dan Rogers says there are some challenges this year “Overall we’ve set a budget target not to exceed a 2.5% increase. I would like to see, and I suppose others would like to see us come in under that. The second key one is how we’re going to map out a financial strategy on how we’re going to pay for our commitment to the Canada Winter Games. That will be in addition to what we look at for the levy so that will be a big challenge during budget discussions.”
The Mayor says he thinks things have started to improve economically for the City, “I’m anxious to see what revenue is coming from new growth in the community, that will give us a bit more breathing room if that has started to see a positive indication. I would also like to see from my own perspective, us to continue to put more money into road rehabilitation. In the past two years the City has increased the amount and made it a record amount, and I would like to see us increase that by another 10% even with the challenges we have.”
Prince George, like most communities across the country, is faced with having to upgrade and replace an aging infrastructure. “Obviously we know that we need to be further along for the road rehabilitation, but for some of the other aspects (of infrastructure) as well as investing in our infrastructure for the longer term.”
The Mayor says in addition to challenges in the operational budget ( which includes rising costs for the RCMP), Rogers says the City will be aggressive in its capital program this year “Boundary Road, a substantial amount of that will be spent this year, the capital program will start to gear up for the RCMP building, we’ll also start to do planning for the District Energy System and the capital expenditures that will occur there, so there will be a number of big projects we will need to manage and we will see some of those come forward in the Capital Budget.”
The budget meeting will start at 4:30 this afternoon with a public input session to start off each meeting. The first session will run until 6:00, Council will then break, and return to their work at 7 p.m.
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Posted by: Surefire on February 9 2011 3:55 PM
Yes Mr Mayor you need to be very agressive you got us into this puddle. All this talk about a 2.5 % increas in taxes is a lot of bull. What will the total increase be 5%, 8%. God only knows.
Cheers