Ward 5 Coun. Bob Kirwan is no fan of the new city budget process brought in by CAO Ed Archer.
“I'm not comfortable with this whole process, if that's the way we're going,” Kirwan said at Tuesday evening's budget meeting.
In past years, each city department would make a presentation to the finance commitee and answer questions about their budgets from council.
This year, however, acting on the direction of councillors, staff came back with a $530 million budget that maintained existing services and limited the property tax increase to 3.6 per cent.
Archer said they looked at each budget line from 2016 and compared what was spent to each department's budget estimate. In cases where spending was lower than estimated, the lower amount became the new budget.
“That applied to all parts of the organization, across the board,” he said.
For example, mayor and councillor office budgets were cut because they came in lower than forecast. Kirwan said that's effectively a service cut, because now
he has less money to help residents.
“We really didn't know what we were approving,” Kirwan said, of the votes directing staff on how to prepare the 2017 budget. “I have to answer to constituents. I'm really not comfortable with this.”
But Ward 7 Coun. Mike Jakubo, who chairs the finance committee, said councillors have had the full budget for weeks and were encouraged to ask questions if they were unsure of anything.
Other councillors asked a total of 95 questions, and both the questions and the answers have been made public.
“So there was a full process in place for that,” Jakubo said.
Mayor Brian Bigger said councillors supported the new budget process, which began last summer. They were kept up to date on what was going on and gave staff direction on how to proceed.
“We gave direction to staff,” Bigger said. “I believe they delivered what we asked for.”
It's important to allow staff to do their job, he added.
“We can't possibly go through every single line” of the budget, Bigger said. “We have to trust our staff.”
“I can't support not knowing how we got to this,” Kirwan responded.
The base budget, including a 3.6 per cent proptery tax increase, was approved by a vote of 9-4. But coucillors still were debating a number of service levels changes as of late Tuesday evening.
They voted to reject an increase in fees at the Howard Armstrong Recreation Centre, which would have saved $22,000, but agreed to hire an asset manager.
Budget discussions were not concluded on Dec. 6 and the Finance Committee will meet again on Dec. 14.
