City Budget: Something Has To Give: MULVIHILL
So, let’s see if we can understand this?
The City of Ottawa has a $10.4-million surplus in the first six months of 2024. The surplus is due to staff vacancies, higher residential water consumption and lower winter maintenance costs. Residents should overjoyed with this windfall but could this surplus be transferred to programs that may need a buck or two? There are myriad areas that could use a little help:
- Public transit is so bad that roads are bumper to bumper chock full of cars;
- Potholes are flourishing ($375 for a front tire, thank you very much);
- Weeds have overtaken most, if not all, public areas;
- Residential household waste will be reduced to three bags every two weeks;
- LRT remains a distant dream;
- Hundreds of millions were paid to unknown LRT contractors for secret settlements …
The list could go on but you get the drift.
It seems that only with additional fees and charges or lower costs can this city realize financial mediocrity. Understanding that circumstances change throughout the year, perhaps it would be wiser to budget for more rather than averaging costs with a reasonable increase thrown in for good measure. There are salaries, benefits, supplies, maintenance, utilities, and associated increases for all expenditures to be considered but if programs are in the red, a closer analysis case-by-case must be included in each budget process to gain a clearer understanding. Perhaps this is done, perhaps this isn’t but if there isn’t enough money in the budget to fix the potholes, clean up the weeds, cut the grass or pick up garbage, then something isn’t working.
To direct staff to prepare a budget with a 2.5-per-cent tax increase is unrealistic. At some point reality hits home. Our city is in a sad state of disrepair but yet pet projects take precedence. Why? The city’s reserves are nearly depleted and financial destitution is on the horizon.
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and every single councillor works for and must answer to residents.
Something has to give.
Donna Mulvihill is a community activist and former hospital coordinator.
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The upcoming Taxi settlement (a predictable result when the city controls a regulated industry then allows unregulated competition) will add perhaps another % to our taxes?
“When the class action was launched in 2016, the $215 million it claimed was the largest ever leveraged against the city,…”
Why is this not on the agenda?
As I understand it, the budget direction is to add 2.9% on top of 2024’s budget amount rather than the actual amount spent.
I’m pretty sure none of us run our household budgetting this way. I can appreciate that, when they start the process of slotting numbers in in June or July, they may not have much to go on. By September or October though, they should have figures that can be extrapolated from 8 or 9 months spending to give a much clearer idea of what is really being spent.
Also why 2.9%? Don’t they realize that we’re onto the game of retail prices that end in .99 and know to round them up instead of down? Why not just say 3% in the first place?
When I’m preparing next year’s grocery budget, if butter cost $5 last October when I drew up this year’s budget but I’m being charged $7 in the store, I don’t put it in the budget at $5.15 but at a minimum of $7.21 if I’m using their very hypothetical 3% as reasonable. I would be more likely to use the more realistic figure of $7.30 or $7.35 since I know that it may still increase before the end of this year and will certainly go up before December 2025, If I can’t afford to buy the same amount of butter at that higher price, I will have to look at curtailing my butter consumption, only buy it on sale, buy a cheaper brand or cut back somewhere else. That’s what the whole concept of budgetting is all about; you either fit the things you need into the budget you have or increase the size of your budget sufficiently to be able to include your needs within it.
I’d love to know if any of our current members of Council have a background in Economics or even a course or two at some point along the way. What do they actually know about budget processes other than the political perspective of ‘don’t let constituents see you raise the price of anything’? It would be interesting to test their ability and understanding when it comes to finance and budgetting before letting them loose on another creative but mythical budgetting process that affects the services we will get and what we’ll pay for them next year.