City budget does an about-face

DRAFT BUDGET RETURNING TO FINANCE COMMITTEE

Six days of deliberations was not enough. And on the seventh day . . . they voted 5-4 to defer the 2019-22 draft operating budget back to Finance Committee on Dec. 3.

They being Lethbridge City Council, meeting on Monday for a regular session, where Coun. Joe Mauro initiated the motion to delay approving the draft budget.

“This is the biggest job of council, is the operating budget and the capital budget,” Mauro said.

“When I saw that there was amendments starting to come, I just felt that rather than trying to deal with these amendments on the fly, and in consideration and respect of what we just went through, the entire six days and every other meeting leading up to the last six days — I just thought we can’t do this on the fly.”

“I’ve never seen this happen before,” said Coun. Ryan Parker, who was chair of Finance Committee for the six-day deliberation.

“This is the first time where we’ve decided to table or delay a decision on the operating budget. But I think it’s good. If one member of council wants an opportunity to absorb what’s been presented, I think it’s a great idea. I’m hoping that two weeks from today we have a budget in front of us that we can hopefully collectively, as a group of all nine of us, support.”

Mauro’s motion to delay stemmed from new amendments arising after Mayor Chris Spearman brought forth the idea of scaling back the Lethbridge Police Service’s additional new funding request from $2,007,620 down to $1,111,899. Spearman’s amendment ultimately passed 6-3 on Monday.

Mauro made a similar resolution proposal on Saturday: “Due to inflation pressures at the business unit level, motion for ‘Be it resolved that $1 million of the $2,007,620 included as increase to the base budget of the Lethbridge Police Service be removed.’” It was defeated 5-4 on Saturday.

“Just last week, I sat across from representatives from the government of Alberta and not once did they mention this to me,” he said in a statement.

“The government of Ontario is committed to reducing interprovincial trade barriers, as we made clear in our fall economic statement when we said we wouldn’t stand in the way of pipeline projects moving forward.”

Neil Herbst, owner of Alley Kat Brewery of Edmonton, said he has faced numerous non-tariff barriers when trying to ship his products to Ontario, giving as an example a $400 laboratory fee assessed on a shipment of $1,600 worth of beer.

Also Monday, Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci said he will cancel by Dec. 15 a program of grants for small Alberta craft brewers in order to bring provincial beer regulations in compliance with Canadian trade law.

The province will return to a similar system that was in place before 2015, with markups (a tax collected for the province) of $1.25 per litre applied to all beer sold in Alberta by producers of more than 50,000 hectolitres per year.

Alberta dropped its graduated markup system to go to a flat markup on all beer in 2015. It at first exempted brewers in Saskatchewan, B.C. and Alberta, then changed its rules so it applied to all Canadian brewers but introduced a subsidy program solely for Alberta’ small brewers.