Greater Sudbury's finance committee reviewed the budgets for two outside boards Tuesday – Greater Sudbury Police and the Nickel District Conservation Authority.
As reported by Sudbury.com Monday, police are seeking a 3.9 per cent increase, of which 0.9 per cent is to fund renovations of police headquarters.
The police's roughly $57 million budget accounts for 0.85 per cent of the overall 3.5 per cent property tax increase estimated for Greater Sudbury in 2018.
While the NDCA's budget request represents a 27 per cent increase compared to last year, in dollar terms it's $184,000, because the authority's entire budget is just more than $1.7 million.
Carl Jorgensen, NDCA general manager and secretary-treasurer, said his group has been underfunded for years, and is tied for dead last in Ontario in per capita funding. The organization costs each taxpayer $4.13 a year, compared to an average of more than $9 in Northern Ontario, and more than $13 province wide.
"Over the years, we've had retirements and attrition, people who weren't replaced,” Jorgensen said. “And we've lost some of the important capacity. It's really just to recapture that."
They're aiming to add the equivalent of four full-time staff – known as FTEs — over the next five years, including 2.7 FTEs this year.
"Out of that is two positions that have existed on paper for quite a while but we haven't had funding for them," he said. "It's really not sustainable, so we really had to make a correction this year."
The effect of underfunding has meant staff can do only immediate, short-term work, not any real planning. So floodplain maps of the city haven't been updated in decades.
"When you don't have enough people to do the work required in an organization, it puts a lot of stress on people," Jorgensen said. "Our floodplain mapping goes back to the late 1970s. But we've had a lot of development in Sudbury since the late 1970s. Updating that and keeping it current is important, because it allows future economic development to happen in places where the risks are minimized."
The first priority will be creating an updated floodplain map of Junction Creek, a waterbody that stretches across 10 of the city's 12 wards.
"Junction Creek is a huge water course — it starts up in Garson and ends up down where it joins the Vermillion River and goes past Walden," he said. "Junction Creek really represents what the majority of the core of the metropolitan area of Sudbury, if you want to call it that. So to have good planning, the watershed mapping that is done there is integral to good planning."
The process will cost between $350,000 and $400,000 over three years, and they have applied to the federal government for funding assistance. In addition to an updated map, Jorgensen said the funding will allow them to develop local expertise to offer city staff and developers the best information for planning decisions.
"It's an important thing to know where those hazardous areas are, given the development that's happened over the last 30 years," he said. “We want staff to become experts in transferring that knowledge to the planning powers that be in Greater Sudbury and to the development community.”
