Proposed Road Tax Will Kick Off Final Budget Meeting

Thursday, February 22, 2007 04:14 AM

Prince George residents will have a clearer picture next Wednesday evening in terms of what to expect on their 2007 property tax notices.

February 28th is the final day for budget deliberations at City Hall with an afternoon session and evening one, if necessary, scheduled for 4:30pm and 7pm, respectively.

City councillors have been working under the guideline of a proposed tax levy increase of 2.4-percent, in keeping with the rate of inflation. However, the first item on next Wednesday's agenda is a proposed road rehabilitation levy of four-percent that could be tacked on, if approved by council.

The levy is seen as one way to move from the city's current method of financing road rehab work over a 15-year term to a "pay-as-you go" approach, and would save an estimated $1.8-million dollars annually in interest.

Both the results of public input sessions and the Finance and Audit Committee's recommendation to adopt the levy were presented at the February 14th budget meeting, but council deferred the matter to the final day of deliberations. (click here for previous story)

Also deferred to that day is a list of more than 20 service enhancement items - most of which, if included, will directly impact the proposed 2.4-percent levy. Topping the list: a request to increase the RCMP's budget to include four new members at a price tag of $236-thousand dollars this year.

If all the enhancement items were to be voted into the 2007 budget, the proposed levy would rise to 4.35-percent.

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Posted on Thursday, February 22, 2007 04:14 AM in News by 250 News

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Comments

Posted by: jonnypg on February 22 2007 4:54 AM

Lets dip into the $51 billion EI surplus!

Posted by: diplomat on February 22 2007 12:36 PM

I would assume that there is no actual account that has $51 billion in it. The surpluses were added to general revenue except for a couple of billions in a working account to service the payout requirements from month to month, year to year.

The Canada Pension plan also works like that. Money comes in and money is paid out of a relatively small every-day account.

I remember provinces getting virtually interest free loans out of the CPP, without any obligation for eventual repayment.

If all the contributions that have been paid from day one had been kept in the CPP (except for the pensions paid out) and earning compound interest Canada pensions could probably be at least doubled starting tomorrow.

If there was any account with $51 billion in it, there would be a mad rush by all the provinces and territories to grab and spend it as soon as possible!

Posted by: Palopu on February 22 2007 4:50 PM

You got it right Diplomat, and we can thank Paul Martin for starting to Skim this money into General Revenue so that he could use it to balance his budgets, instead of reducing the payments by employees and employers, and extending benefits to those that need them.

He did this while he was Finance Minister and was quite proud of his ability to balance a budget. However in fact he did nothing but transfer money from EU to General Funds.

If we are going to borrow Millions for the Cameron St Bridge, New Police Station, Co-Generating Plant, and eventually a hugely expensive Performing Arts Centre, and finance these projects over 15 years and pay interest, we may as well continue to finance our roads, as we are going to be about as broke as we can get.

Posted by: diplomat on February 22 2007 5:11 PM

Obviously the skimming is still going on today and no politician is going to stop milking that cash cow for bolstering general revenue.

We may as well continue to finance our roads is not a bad idea as far as my interpretation goes - because I simply can not fathom and can not get any explanation for the reason why this particular road repair effort was all of a sudden dragged onto the front burner, into the spotlight!

To me it almost looks like a reaction from City Hall which wants to PUNISH us with the new road levy for speaking out about the sad state of affairs of our roads!

At the last city council meeting of 2006 the mayor seemed to be very annoyed about the many calls in respect to the roads he was getting all the time, because in his opinion (stated at that council meeting) he personally doesn't find them to be too bad at all.

Is this an omen of things to come?

Posted by: Palopu on February 22 2007 8:00 PM

I suspect that by getting the road repairs done by a special levy, this will leave the City additional room to borrow money for the things I mentioned above. I suspect they will have to borrow some money for the Cameron St., bridge fairly quickly as it has been sitting idle for these past 17 Months, and they will have to do something soon or they will look foolish.

They are trying to get money for this bridge from the Feds, and Provincial Government, and I understand that they made application a couple of weeks ago. If they do get some money they will still have to come up with their portion, which would be approx what they would borrow for road repairs in the next couple of years.

In actual fact they would still be borrowing the money for road repairs, because the Cameron St., bridge is part of the City road system, however they will be able to show it as borrowing for a **Capital Cost Project** and hence feel that they have pulled the wool over our eyes once again.

I still maintain that they should have, repaired this bridge immediately for $724,000.00 and got on with it, however the Mayor wants a new bridge. Hopefully they will not name it after him.

A new bridge for 8000 vehicles per day, and a twinned bridge for 22000 vehicles (Simon Fraser) per day is ludicrous, however its about the best that anyone can come up with to create some employment in the short term.

Posted by: diplomat on February 23 2007 8:17 AM

Good points. I think that they should have applied to get funds for the bridge from Ottawa & Victoria within a couple of weeks after they closed the bridge for all traffic!

After all, they were never going to consider the option of repairing it for 724k at all.

That, all by itself, is really foolish.