Budget Hole: Will The Province Step In?
Is sending the broad strokes of the budget another manipulation of municipal government?
Will that manipulation halt discussion on Dec. 11 of the legality of passing a budget that has a $36-million hole in it and is not balanced?
Will the audit committee actually deal with it on Monday or will they punt it to a future meeting which will be held after Dec. 11, giving Ottawa City Council a chance to receive information that the matter is being dealt with by the audit committee so go ahead and pass the holey budget as is and don’t worry your pretty little heads about what is really just a small accounting issue that nobody needs to be concerned about?
The sad part is the number of councillors that I foresee swallowing this ruse and approving the budget as is with no questions, intelligent or otherwise.
I hate to sound like a broken record but will the adoption of a non-balanced budget perhaps be the tipping point for the province to intervene? How much more mismanagement can Queen’s Park possibly ignore? (Yes, I do realize that I probably already know the answer to that … unfortunately)
The downside is that the province might tell city hall it must produce a balanced budget and city hall will do so by producing a further list of cuts that cover the $36-million. Any objections to the new cuts will be met with the reply that they have no choice but to cut the budget by that amount and it has to be done by Dec. 31 to take effect Jan. 1 when the new fiscal year starts. The argument for such rapid action will be that if they wait until the year has begun, the cuts would need to be even deeper.
Cutting $1.20 over 12 months is $0.10 a month while cutting it over 10 months is $0.12 a month – now multiply that by the $36 million to be cut.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
For You:
Sutcliffe Team Gets More Watson Look
$36M Budget Hole Goes To Audit Committee: WHOPPER WATCH
Senior Transit Pass: Way Too Much: MULVIHILL
Bookmark The Bulldog, click here
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
I went over the budget or rather budgets as there appears to be 2 different sets of books, but I’m open to being corrected. The audited financial statements from last year don’t seem to align with the budget being discussed, we’ll call this the city budget here. Remember that previous city budgets up until last year included the Kathleen Wynne election promise for increased gas tax revenues for the city instead of actual amount that the city was going to receive. The audited financial statements for 2024 come out after the 2025 budget is approved sadly and not even the Q3 estimates are available to see the actuals for 2024 to date. The city seems to ignore the planned budget anyway and put in new programs not considered in the forward budget planning. Like the 100 additional staff this past year added to the 85 staff from last year at $200 K pp with overheads and employment costs is $37M per year in extra HR costs alone, not including the actual budget for the work they are doing. The city budget says that they are playing on only adding 10 bylaw next year. I call BS. They’ve been adding 8 to 10 times that amount annually. And the city budget says that because they are giving out less speed camera tickets than anticipated, that this is listed as a deficit or loss instead of lower revenue? There isn’t enough fidelity provided in the audited financial statements provided online to compare to the city budget directly of course. It is apparent though that the city, by adding expensive programs during the year, ignores their budget pretty much anyway.