Chris Bentley says the city could do a much better job of building budgets.
Instead of budgeting from the top down, the Ward 6 candidate says Sudbury should be doing it from the bottom up.
“What this means, in essence, is that Council approves the total amount of the budget, along with any associated tax increase first, and then approves the numbers to justify it. How can you properly approve a half million dollar budget like this?” Bentley said. “I am not an accountant or a business owner, but this sure does seem backwards to me. Sure, it is easier. The budget gets completely approved in about three meetings. But is it right? I don’t think so.
“How will we ever be able to find any efficiencies in our City’s departments if we are blindly approving numbers and only challenging business cases?”
Saying the Kingsway Entertainment District and the Junction arts and culture hub — two major projects the city has on the books with a price tag of around $100-million apiece — are “vital to a prosperous future,” Bentley said there’s a better way to pay for them.
“How do we pay for them? Sure, there will be new commercial tax revenue from the casino and the hotel, as well as an anticipated increase in gaming revenue paid to the city by OLG,” he said. “But where does the rest of it come from? How are we going to pay for all of this? Right now, it appears to be coming from taxpayers’ pockets over the long haul. Does it have to? Absolutely not. Can we find savings within the annual budget to help offset the cost of these projects? Certainly not the way the City currently addresses the annual budget.
City council, he said, should be going over the entire budget, line by line, one department at a time.
“How else are we ever going to see where we are overspending or underfunding? How can a councillor clearly explain to constituents where their hard-earned tax dollars are going, when they truly do not know the answer? I would love to see the budget system return to a line-by-line approach and built from the bottom up,” he said.
“If we want to be able to afford and enjoy the transformational projects we have planned then we need to do what we can to afford it. That starts with our budgeting process. There are two ways to come up with the amount of money needed to pay the mortgage, increase revenue or decrease expenses. Increasing the revenue right now means raising taxes. That is not a fair approach when we haven’t even looked to see if we can decrease expenses. I know it is not as easy as it sounds, but budgeting for a half-billion dollar corporation should not be a piece of cake. It should take a lot of time and a lot of effort.”
If elected in Ward 6, Bentley said he will push for a new approach to budgeting.
