The City of Quesnel’s Finance Committee is going to take another run at the 2025 operating budget today (Wednesday) in an effort to trim what would be an 8.6 percent tax increase.
Councillor Mitch Vik, the Chair of the Committee, told Council that it was “a serious number, but obviously this is our first pass, we’ve asked staff to go back and see what can be done, some efficiencies, discretionary spending, all of the above.”
Vik said there were a number of reasons for the potential increase.
“First and foremost it’s inflationary pressure by labour costs. We have a new collective agreement with our unions which is a 5 percent increase in wages in June 2024 to be followed by subsequent increases in subsequent years in the collective agreement. Then there are some things we have noted that we are hoping to find some efficiencies with. Our downtown washroom has significant costs with janitorial and security costs, we also took a look at the rental revenue with some of the leases of our city owned buildings. As those leases come up we’re going to look at those agreements, so it’s just a lens of being prudent in the future with those agreements as they come up.”
Vik also noted that the budget for both the airport and transit functions would require significant increases over last year.
“For airport, we’re looking at a 14.9 percent increase over last year so that’s another 70 thousand dollars. And transit is a 22 percent increase which is a 117,000 over last year.”
Director of Finance Kari Bolton went into more detail about why the increases were necessary.
“With both of those functions we did have COVID grants over the COVID years, so that funding has now run out and now we’re back to normal operations, although operations aren’t quite up to what they used to be at the airport. And it’s just the challenges, transit costs have gone up substantially, fuel, all those sort of things, so they’re facing the same increases that we have.”
On a positive note, Bolton also confirmed last (Tuesday) night that the city’s snow removal budget for 2024 came in about 19 percent under budget, which amounts to approximately 265 thousand dollars.
That money will go into surplus.
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