Councillor slams additional municipal expenses

Pine Solitaire District Councilor Pierre Avard has expressed deep concern over the increase in unbudgeted spending the City of Sherbrooke has recorded and was surprised that some of his colleagues said they were not aware of the situation.

"I personally raised the issue last spring when we were presented with a first report showing additional expenses of $1.2 million for the first four months of the year,” he said in a press release. ”I said that this worried me very much. In the months that followed, I have repeatedly stressed the fact that we were regularly presented with reorganizations of services accompanied by the creation of positions, piecemeal, with no real staffing plan.

“I returned to the charge on two other occasions,” he continued, “the last time just a few weeks ago, to find out the situation as of August 31. But I realize that not only have I never received this report as requested, but I do not know by what magic, this famous report was found yesterday, on the front page of the La Tribune newspaper."

Avard said he was not really surprised to see that the total additional spending had reached a level of more than $1.8 million four months later. "It is clear

that the additional requests that were removed during the study of the budget in November 2017 have reappeared one by one in recent months. Once again, I denounce this way of doing things, namely, presenting files piecemeal without any overview and especially without a clear budgetary objective," he said.

He also dismissed the excuse of the 2017 tax freeze. "For me, the excuse of the tax freeze, in the last budget, is too simple. Our responsibility is to manage according to our means and to make sure that additional expenses are the exception and not the rule.”

Avard also strongly disagreed with the idea that there is no cause for concern because new revenues will offset the additional expenses. "This is a very bad way to administer public funds,” he said. ”When we talk about administrative rigor, we’re talking about controlling expenses, especially when they are recurrent. It will be great if new revenues are added during the year, but that's not a reason to spend them as you go. If we applied responsible management rules, these sums should instead be added to the reserve in order to improve the City's room for maneuver and thus make the City less vulnerable to emergencies or possible upheavals in the area’s economy. These new revenues should also be used to contain tax increases within the rate of inflation. There is no guarantee that revenues will always be there when we will still have to face recurring expenses," he concluded.