By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

promise kept

City trims another $400,000 from this year’s budget

Feb 3, 2020 | 6:46 PM

A promise made is a promise kept after Red Deer’s City Manager vowed last month that staff would find an additional $400,000 in savings following the conclusion of Operating Budget debate.

The extra pinched pennies (or nickels) means bringing the property tax increase down further from 1.26 per cent to 0.97 per cent. It began at 2.48. City council unanimously approved the savings at their meeting on Monday.

“It’s important as a municipality that we are always cognizant of trying to keep our costs reasonable,” says City Manager Allan Seabrooke. “I think this was a very responsible way of doing that given the economic times that we and lot of our residents and businesses find themselves in.”

The first portion comes in the form of a less than projected hit to police fine revenue. During budget, council agreed to reduce projected fine revenue by $821,980, a move made necessary by the Alberta Government’s decision to take more from municipalities.

Instead, they will only reduce the revenue projection by $616,485, meaning an overall cost savings of $205,495. This is possible because the new provincial policy does not take effect until April 1, or 25 per cent of the calendar year, thereby knocking the same amount off the original change.

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Second is an eliminated cost of $123,538 related to the depreciation of a portion of money which was budgeted as a transfer to capital reserves.

Lastly, a reduction of $70,967 is being made to the personnel provision. This provision covers increased wage costs related to union contract increases, benefit changes etc., all of which are in place, except for those covered by the International Association of Fire Fighters. The City was able to estimate how much that contract — which is currently being negotiated — will need, and eliminate a small amount.

“We feel good as an administration that we were able to go back and find these provisions,” Seabrooke adds. “It’s been a process with the province(on fine revenue) that has been challenging because as we’ve moved through our budget process, we had a lot of it done and then got notification about their cuts.”

A property tax increase of 0.97 per cent equates to a $1.87/month ($22.46/year) increase on the average home’s property tax bill.

Keeping on the topic of budgets, it’s official that city council will deliberate them much differently going forward.

Instead of debating the capital and operating budgets individually in November and January, they will be done concurrently from Nov. 30-Dec. 4. Additionally, they will be done for both 2021 and 2022, as opposed to one year at a time.