With budget deliberations just around the corner, the Standing Committee on Finance and Audit will recommend a tax increase of two percent to Prince George City Council.
The Committee met today (Monday) to officially launch the formal budget process for the city.
City Councillor Garth Frizzell explained the focus of the meeting was to settle on a ‘happy medium’ that would keep the levy relatively low, and still leave money left over for unforeseen circumstances.
“This is really preliminary,” Frizzell told MyPGNow, “We started out by looking at what the costs would be for this year, and then we forecasted that over to 2021.”
“Those costs came out at 3.16 percent. All things being equal, just to keep the same level of service we had before.”
The possibility of a 3.16 percent increase would include boosting the infrastructure fund by $125,000 to $2.67 million and increasing the snow removal budget to $10M from $8.5M.
However, Frizzell pointed out the city received $6.11M in funding from the provincial and federal government’s restart fund to aid in pandemic recovery, something Frizell says was sorely needed.
A two percent tax hike, for example, would see Prince George spend $1.3M of the funding.
Alternatively, increasing the levy by only one percent would see the city eat a total of $2.4M.
Finally, Prince George would spend $3.5M of the funding with a zero percent increase.
“What are we going to use it for, that was our question. If we spent it almost all the way down, we could get to a zero percent increase, but that would be a one-time affair,” Frizzell explained.
“We don’t know what expenses are coming up in 2021. So we had to balance between keeping a surplus for a really likely rainy day next year or spending it down to reduce the additional cost to taxpayers.”
Budget deliberations will be brought before Council in January.
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