"At the first meetings last week, the original summary did not include a special levy to cover the city's share of capital costs of the 2015 Winter Games."

So who was responsible for passing that on to Council without the obvious additional expenditure? And which Councillor(s) failed to observe that?

The RCMP increase is 6.7%. It looks like we are paying for a projected increase in the cost of DNA sample processing for 2011.

I think the bad part of this is that there is no evidence of an increase in the quantity or quality of service to be delivered. In fact, that part of the change does not seem to get reported. We just see the dollars.

Tell us how departments might be becoming more effective/efficient in the services they provide which results in less cost per service category delivered. Then show us which services are being increased in quantity and/or quality and how much of that can be done with a status quo or increased budget amount.

Of course it helps when Councillors can read financial statements so that people do not have to write letters to the editor to explain how to read such documents. ;-)

Every member of the budget committee should read the attached article. With municipal elections in November, I can hardly wait to hear the excuses for the endless tax increases counter to the promises they made to hold the line.

{url]http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Between+2000+2009+Property+taxes+went+cities+away+with/3967195/story.html{/url]

I encourage everyone to forward a copy of this article to:
{url]2011budget@city.pg.bc.ca[/url]

Every member of the budget committee should read the attached article. With municipal elections in November, I can hardly wait to hear the excuses for the endless tax increases counter to the promises they made to hold the line.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Between+2000+2009+Property+taxes+went+cities+away+with/3967195/story.html

I encourage everyone to forward a copy of this article to:
2011budget@city.pg.bc.ca

hopefully I fixed the links

where going to be the highest taxed city in the dam whole country!!

they say 4.2 but everytime its over budget we can be looking at 6 percent hike. I think as a city we need to come together and tell the city officials enough is enough!

2011budget@city.pg.bc.ca


email address not a link-sorry

This is BS. Council needs to balance their books or find new jobs

how much long term debt does the city have?

While I do not like to see taxes go up without some reasonable explanation such as increase in quality/quantity of service, the fact of the matter is that there are some differences which are not accounted for in a federal, versus provincial versus municipal comparison.

1. Not all municipalities are the same. The fact is this municipality has dropped in population whereas others have increased and some have increased very rapidly, thus they have an increasing resource for taxes and an increasing need to spend, but the satellite bedroom community municipalities have a much lower proportion of their spending needs towards upkeep. If there were a few more budget categories one would be able to look at a profile of a city such as Surrey, Abbottsford, Kelowna, etc. compared to PG and even Kamloops.

2. The higher level governments have, in our case, an increasing population and therefore an increasing revenue source. The more people, the more economies of scale and the less the proportion everyone has to pay for the same service.

3. Higher levels of government can and do offload their responsibilities to lower levels of government. Cities are the lowest on the totem pole and they know it. The costs of crime prevention and enforcement are a good example.

4. Many of the services a municipality provide are needed more often by more people at the same time than many of the services provided by the higher levels of government. When pot holes don’t get fixed, a 1,000+ people drive over those potholes on Ospika in any given day. 20,000+ drivers may be affected by no snow clearing after a 20 cm snowfall on a Saturday/Sunday when few crews are out. When we can’t get immediate service in the emergency room at the hospital, it only affect 20 or 30 people a day in the City. They complain to their friends and family and the medical staff and may, on occasion write a letter to the editor. The complaints about the lack of armed forces and equipment for their proper carrying out of duties garner even less concern. On the other hand, compared to city streets, the province and feds maintain their highways in relatively excellent shape.

5. Senior governments have different pots they can dig into. No one seems to care too much, especially if they fool around with lowering taxes here and raising them there just to keep everyone confused. No one can really figure it out. Obfuscation at its finest.

Cities, on the other hand, essentially have three pots – direct property tax, direct user fees, and senior government grants. I don’t even want to go into the possible ways that provinces and the feds can raise money, far too many to mention. BUT … now and then they screw up too …… HST … :-)

"Council needs to balance their books or find new jobs"

Balancing the books is the law for municipaliteis. Not so for province and feds. And they do balance their books.

That is the other difference I forgot to mention.

Why do we allow them to increase the 'road rehabilitaion' levy when a couple of years ago they increased our taxes especially for that and then gave poorer service in patching potholes? It didn't improve the situation at all, in fact the situation worsened. Last year was the same and now they want to increase it again. There are lots of holes out there to fix right now and NOTHING is being done about it. I think its the management's fault because they go about it in such a hodge-podge way. There is no organised or systematic plan or direction to go over the whole town. Oh, there's one over there to fix and then there's that one over there. Funny but around city hall, everything is neat and tidy. I think City hall should be last on the prioity list, just so that they can have an accurate guide as to what is really going on 'out there', for snow clearing too, then they might see.

"Why do we allow them to increase the 'road rehabilitaion' levy when a couple of years ago they increased our taxes especially for that and then gave poorer service in patching potholes"

I think the answer to that is that the levy was to pay for the service as it happens rather than to borrow the money each year and have a perpetual debt due to that line item. That will result in less interest payments for that one annual expense.

If you want better service, well, then that would be another increase .....

One of those games that was not well communicated by the city I think. Or people were just not tuning in properly .....

Maybe comes under truth in advertising .... there was not lie as such, but the explanation was poor.

Of course, you want better explanations .... well, you have to hire a $75,000 per year assistant to the $100,000+ per year communicator that should be taking care of that ... LOL