Borrow, or not?

Summerside council discusses where to spend unbudgeted money from province

Summerside Mayor Bill Martin had to cast a rare tie-breaking vote during a recent council meeting regarding the fate of an unexpected $280,000 windfall. The money was made available to the city by the province in an effort to help the municipality with its snow clearing costs. However, it was not taken into account in the city’s budget, which was passed in January. So the question became: what should happen to the funding?

In the end, council voted four to four on whether to move ahead with using the snow clearing money to help fund the water and sewer projects, leaving the mayor to cast the deciding vote. He opposed the motion.

“I’ll deny it and we’ll discuss it again in the May committee of council meeting,” said Martin. Council voted during last month’s committee of council meeting to recommend that the money be put towards the city’s share of a number of projects it had earmarked under the federal Clean Water And Wastewater fund. Some examples include MacKenzie Drive storm sewer work, Water Street culvert replacement and creek enhancement, and South Drive & Water Street storm systems.

A motion was presented to council earlier this week to spend the $280,000 and borrow an additional $252,280 as its share of six water and sewer projects.

However, some councillors argued the city is going to spend the money on water and sewer projects regardless of where the money comes from, because it won’t risk losing out on partnership money from other levels of government.

They would rather see the city borrow the entire amount for its share of the water and sewer projects and spend the windfall from the province on projects that might not qualify for partnership funding.

“I could see the $280,000 being used towards other projects that got put off from the budget,” said Coun. Tyler DesRoches. He suggested a new salt shed or accessible playground equipment would be a good fit. Both are projects that were left on the budget cutting room floor this year .

“I understand we’re trying to take our debt down and all that – but at what cost? We didn’t budget this extra money to come in and it could go to a lot of good things,” he said.

Coun. Gordie Whitlock disagreed with DesRoches’s proposal.

He said it would not be prudent.

“While I know that’s tempting, the fact of the matter is that we went through the budget process, we ran short obviously. There was all kinds of things that got put out of the budget,” said Whitlock.

He said it would not be prudent to “go out and borrow another $280,000. We could have done that at budget time and put the playground equipment in and put the salt shed in. We chose not to.”