Owen Sound Council has approved the city’s budget for 2012.
There was little discussion among councillors and none at all from the public before a 4.97 per cent budget increase was unanimously approved on Monday night.
That’s up from 4.6 per cent two weeks ago after the City received the surprising news that the province was deducting 61 thousand dollars in court security money from Owen Sound’s municipal transfer payments.
The city hadn’t planned for that unexpected development in its budget deliberations, so there were two choices open to council and staff — go to the ratepayers to cover the shortfall, or look for the savings elsewhere and keep the budget increase as is.
It was felt that because it was a bare-bones budget to begin with, there was no more room to trim and so the public would have to be asked to cover the shortfall.
Combined with the county and education levies, it results in an overall levy increase of 3.12 per cent for city taxpayers.
The tax ratios have not yet been determined but, because the city has committed to reducing the ratios applied to the business classes, an increased tax burden will automatically shift to residential.
The overall increase to residential taxpayers will be between approximately 5.5 and 6 per cent.
This means a hike of 165 dollars on an average residential property assessed at $193,500.
The only real discussion centred around Councillor Peter Lemon’s contention that, given the province’s unexpected shortchanging of the city, Council’s approval of the revised budget would be seen as giving in to Queen’s Park.
Mayor Deb Haswell assured Lemon that Council has no intention of just dropping the matter.
But she says the budget needed to be approved regardless because the business of the city must carry on.
This is the earliest budget approval in recent memory, and an objective of that was to ensure the city could get tenders out sooner than usual and attract more competitive bids from contractors.
