Owen Sound Council and Staff will get together on Thursday and Friday for what’s being called a pre-budget round table discussion at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery.
It combines two previous aspects of financial discussions in Owen Sound — Service Analysis and Pre-budget meetings.
Mayor Deb Haswell says the goal is to just leap right in and begin going over the figures.
She says council and staff already have good grasps on the services provided by the city and on which of those services are most important to ratepayers.
Haswell believes she and council have a strong mandate to do whatever is necessary to find efficiencies in city programs, having just come through a recent election.
The mayor says she pointed out during the campaign that the services enjoyed by residents come with a price tag, and if they want to keep those services, the money to provide them has to come from somewhere.
The province can be counted on for less of that money than before, as it was recently announced that transfer payments to the city will be slashed by another 162 thousand dollars in 2011.
The cut wasn’t as deep as it might have been — staff and council feared it could be more than 300 thousand dollars — but Haswell says it’s still a significant cut and it must be addressed.
Several years ago the city instituted a successful program called OSCARS — Owen Sound Can Achieve Real Savings.
It encouraged city employees to make suggestions on how they could do their jobs more efficiently.
Haswell says a similar program will return in the near future.
Further pre-budget talks are scheduled for February 11th, with actual budget deliberations set to take place on March 23rd and 24th.
