A higher percentage of new home growth as well as some surplus money found from year-end savings in the 2015 budget have allowed for the County to pass a slightly higher budget and begin tackling the large infrastructure gap. The move has been praised as a wise one by County Treasurer Alan Selby, who warned that without taking the leap they are this year, we will be looking at an even more out-of-control infrastructure gap.

“New property growth is a good fortune for us in 2016, and we are suggesting strongly that we need to seize this now,” said Mr. Selby, prior to council’s vote on the budget. “I can guarantee it will not be matched in 2017; this is the peak. We will have to have further steps after 2016, but they’ll be smaller steps, and smaller steps will mean it will take longer to reach our goal.”

Thursday night’s budget presentation began with a breakdown of several changes to the original draft budget that Mr. Selby and staff would be able to make based on the found savings, should council approve of them.

Along with the increase in infrastructure needs due to the years of consecutively deferring necessary projects, another issue came in with the lack of gas tax funds available to help counter the tax-payer impact. In 2015, County Council voted to use $800,000 in gas tax funds to help offset the capital budget, but now, they no longer have access to it.

The budget is also looking at an increase of about $1.8 million in the additional work needs to be faced by the county.

“Project deferrals equal higher costs,” said Mr. Selby. “Each year we have deferred, the project cost only goes in one direction.”

The first notable difference in Thursday’s budget presentation was that there was an automatic reduction in the final numbers from the Health Unit for the 2015 year, by around $27,000.

There were six other changes that were suggested prior to the final budget discussion, which included the following:

Change One — The Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund (OCIF) subsidy for 2016 was not listed in the original version of the draft budget, adding an additional $88,300 in revenue to the budget.

Change Two — As the financial year is coming to an end and third-quarter numbers are rolling in, some costs ended up being lower than they were expecting, leaving some surplus numbers from several of the project budgets, totalling around $350,000.

Change Three — This was identified as the most aggressive change by Mr. Selby, and involved pulling $550,000 from the Roads Rehab Reserve, which currently sits at a balance of $679,037.

Change Four — Currently, the rail trails/fencing corridor projects sit at $225,000 in the budget. The project is an ongoing capital program that has money in the budget over a ten year program. Mr. Selby has suggested to take $125,000 from the Dufferin Wind Power Reserve Fund, so that they can increase the amount done on the project without actually affecting the tax levy.

Change Five — In 2011, a bridges project began in partnership with Simcoe County, as the bridges being fixed bordered both counties. Throughout the project, Dufferin County has submitted half the costs for the projects. Going into 2015, Dufferin County had approximately $100,000 left on the books from funds raised for this particular project. Recently, Mr. Selby had confirmation that Simcoe will only require approximately $10,000 more for the project to be finished, leaving an additional $90,000. He suggested, that since the money had been raised for bridge projects initially, it be applied to other bridge projects listed in the 2016 Capital Budget.

Change Six — Despite taking so much from the Gas Tax fund last year, there is a small amount of approximately $100,000 remaining in the fund. Mr. Selby’s suggestion here was to apply those funds to the Waste Services building project, as the estimated cost of the project is $100,000.

All six changes were passed by council, which decreased the initial tax levy proposed in October from 11.07 percent to 6.94 percent. And while that number still might seem daunting, an increase in property growth helped the number of the actual tax impact shrink even further.

“Last month, we guessed that there would be about a two percent increase in growth,” said Mr. Selby. “We have more accurate numbers from MPAC, and that growth number from new properties is actually at 3.24 percent. It is the best we’ve had since the 1990s.”

Although the numbers are not final as more assessments are being completed, Mr. Selby assured council that the only changes that could occur from this point is that the number would go up, not down, benefitting local tax-payers further.

“All that is going to do, if anything, is add more properties to the County numbers,” he said.
If the growth number does not increase further, that means that with the budget where it stands, tax payers will be looking at a tax increase of 3.7 percent, or the equivalent of $14.36 per $100,000 of assessment on their property value.

Following the presentation, Councillor Don MacIver pointed out that last year, there were suggestions for cuts to the Operations Budget, which had not been made as part of this year’s budget.

“Last year, we took a different approach when coming up with numbers, and we’re sure that it happened that staff were able to increase efficiency in projects and save us 1.5 percent in the coming year,” he said. “Where do you stand in terms of confidence that we could do it again.”

Mr. Selby responded that he did not feel confident this was achievable again.

“I can tell you the reason it was achieved was because of a couple fortunate circumstances that will not happen again in this budget,” he explained. “Because of that we have not included it, because we do not feel that it would be achievable in 2016.”

He added that staff felt that any further reductions in the Operational budget would impede their ability to deal with any circumstances that are out of their control, such as if we experience another winter as difficult as the 2013/2014 year.

“We’re concerned if we reduce the Operational side any lower than it is, we are taking away the flexibility to handle anything that doesn’t go the way we’ve planned,” said Mr. Selby.
However, Councillor MacIver felt that was not a valid reason to not ask staff to try and reduce their budgets by finding another 1.5 percent of in-year savings.

Most on Council, however, did not seem to agree with Mr. MacIver.

“I’m going to vote against it, and I’ve spoken about this before a bunch of times,” said Councillor Darren White. “It’s our job here to set a budget. It is not fair for us to tell staff to go back to what we’ve told them is their budget and make them find a bunch of money. Let’s do our job and not put it on staff. It puts staff in a position that if they want to look good to senior staff, they have to make a bad decision, and we shouldn’t be putting them in this position.”

The motion was defeated.

In conclusion, Mr. Selby recommended that taking the extra step forward this year would allow Council to keep the steady increase of approximately 2 percent in each of the following years, and bring the County closer to closing the ever-growing infrastructure gap.

“We can’t have huge tax increases that people can’t afford, but we need to make progress consistently year after year,” said Mr. Selby. “We can’t make a nice step in 2016 and then stop. That happened in 2009; we had a nice increase, and then it never went up again. The important thing to remember is that the more time that passes by, the more expensive the goal becomes. It won’t stay fixed at $10 million.”

In a recorded vote, the motion to send the budget to staff to draft a by-law was passed 22-9, with only Councillors Jeremy Williams, Jane Aultman, and Don MacIver voting against.
To read the Citizen’s original coverage on the 2016 Budget, which explains the infrastructure gap and how it affected the numbers, read it online at https://new.citizen.on.ca/?p=4406.