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HomeNewsWilliams Lake Council Considering One Percent Tax Hike

Williams Lake Council Considering One Percent Tax Hike

Williams Lake Council is considering a one percent tax increase.

“We’re paying about $2.2 million dollars for the finalization of the Toop Rd. construction project which we’re going to take over two pay periods -2019 and 2020,” Councillor Scott Nelson said Wednesday after Tuesday’s committee of whole council meeting.

“We’re not defined on the one percent but it’s something that we do want to take a look at in terms of being able to make sure that as the costs of inflation and everything else takes appearance that we’ve got things well intact.”

“We’ve got everything inside the budget that we pretty well have needed to achieve, but we’re very, very pleased with the tremendous growth that we’ve had in the city, and there’s a lot of big-ticket items that haven’t hit the assessment rolls yet so from that perspective the city is in a very good position.”

Nelson adds that an approximate growth of 5.1 percent of new assessments will bring in new tax revenue of just under $500,000.

“It puts the city in a very good position to utilize any tax increases that we do will go directly into roads and resurfacing the roads in our community,” he said noting there were 64 major capital projects on the go in 2018 with 45 proposed major capital projects in the 2019 budget.

“Out of the 2018 budget, about 20 of those projects are seventy to eighty percent complete. So we’ve had some rollover from those projects into the calendar year of 2019 and what we did was rather than spending the full $13.8 million dollars we’ve asked Council to cut out approximately $1 million dollars to reduce the capacity on the staff and then make sure that what we can do is complete the projects that we’ve taxed for, and taking the payment for the Toop Road project over a two year period has reduced our overall budget by about $2 million dollars.”

Council also discussed at Tuesday’s meeting to use projected operating surpluses from respective funds to fund capital projects and to apply for $4.6 million in grants.

The 2019 budget is anticipated to be finalized in May.

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