Budget? What budget? They have other issues
Everything from crosswalks to depression discussed at ‘refreshing’ Victoria town hall
It was billed as a town hall on Victoria’s preliminary budget, but there was little in the way of commentary on taxes or utility bills.
Instead, the more than 100 people who participated Thursday evening focused on everything from the need for traffic calming, crosswalks and preserving the old Johnson Street Bridge as a rail crossing to whether police should be the first line of response when someone is depressed.
“You never know what’s going to happen at a budget town hall because the budget is about every good and service that we deliver in the following year,” said Mayor Lisa Helps, adding that she found the session — the fourth the city has done in this way — to be “really refreshing.”
“Our residents came informed. They had clearly done some reading of the documents. They had good questions and they had good comments. I was really impressed, actually,” Helps said.
Longtime council veteran Geoff Young said the session was a far cry from “engagement” of old, when the mayor of the day would simply pause at a certain point in a council meeting and ask if there was any member of the public who wanted to speak to the budget.
“In most cases, either no one — or perhaps one person or maybe two — spoke on the issue,” he said. “In many cases, I’m sure, nobody spoke.”
Young said the comments, though diverse, did speak to the issue at hand.
“The comments were wideranging, but I think that is legitimate, because the budget does affect a lot of those issues. The budget is central to decisions about crosswalks and bike paths and road calming and spending on the arts and a whole lot of things,” he said.
“The budget is our limitation on what we can spend and how quickly we can do things.”
The city is also running an online survey on budget proposals.
Councillors will receive a report on all the public consultation and then make final decisions on the budget over the course of two meetings in January.
Under the city’s preliminary budget, homeowners are facing property tax and utility increases averaging more than $90 next year.
The proposed increase of 2.8 per cent would translate into $92 for a home assessed at $641,000. That includes increases of $65 in property taxes, $13 for water, $7 for solid waste and $7 for the new stormwater utility.
For a business assessed at $540,000, an increase of 2.8 per cent equates to an extra $215 — a $186 increase in property taxes, $13 in water and $16 to the stormwater utility.
City financial staff are conservatively estimating the 2017 surplus at $2 million. As much as $1.3 million in revenue from new assessments might be available to fund new initiatives or capital projects, or to reduce taxes, city staff say.
The budget proposes $1.46 million in new one-time supplemental items and $705,000 in new ongoing supplemental items.
New ongoing expenditures include $328,000 to hire a new parks planner, a transportation planner and a fire-prevention officer, $99,000 to hire a new waste-management engineer, $99,000 for a building-project administrator, $81,000 for graphic-design support and $20,000 for a youth leaders in training program.
New initiatives identified as one-time only include $300,000 for parks cleanup related to overnight sheltering, $150,000 for high-risk tree removal, $109,000 for a public engagement adviser and $180,000 for neighbourhood transportation management.