Discussions on the City of Prince George’s 2023 budget will continue on Wednesday.
The discussions started during an eight-hour meeting last night (Monday).
“Administration and council takes very seriously the responsibility to keep the tax increase as low as possible, and administration has calculated the cost of maintaining existing services to be 7.23 per cent,” said City Manager Walter Babicz.
“This is an ‘essentials only’ budget this year.”
City Director of Finance Kris Dalio added there were three options that could potentially raise the tax increase even further.
Those included service enhancements for the RCMP as recommended in a resource review of the Prince George detachment that was presented to city council in December (0.86 per cent increase) and a one-time Fire Services Training Facility Feasibility Study (0.08 per cent increase).
The other option would be to increase the levy by 0.97 per cent to reflect the Citizen Budget Survey results.
The city does have approximately $2.8 million left of a Safe Restart Grant from the provincial and federal governments.
That could be used to lower the tax increase to 4.82 per cent, if all of the remaining funds are used.
In 2021, funds from that grant was used to lower the tax levy to a zero per cent increase, and down to a three per cent increase last year.
“I think it was the right decision at the time, but to continue to defer taxes using the Safe Restart funds isn’t really helping anybody, as we’re just kicking the can further down the road,” said Councillor Kyle Sampson.
Dalio noted that fund could possibly be used for retroactive pay for the RCMP.
“When the RCMP members unionized, they basically went back four years, and we’ve been setting aside money to retro bill when it comes,” Dalio explained.
“I think we estimate that to be somewhere around $5.5 million, give or take a little bit, so we could use the safe restart funds to fund part of that retro-payment that we are going to have to pay.”
Sampson later added the city was still waiting to hear back from the federal government on the RCMP’s retroactive pay.
“They negotiated a deal that included a deal with higher wages, higher investments in tech, body cameras, all those types of things that have direct impacts on our budgets without any conversation with municipalities,” Sampson said.
“We’re still waiting for Trudeau’s government to come to the table and that hasn’t happened yet, so I would encourage our council to send another letter, because frankly, I just don’t think the City of Prince George has to accept a ‘no response’ from the federal government, we need to have at least a ‘no’ on record and why.”
The RCMP contract with the city will cost nearly $32-million in 2023.
Budget talks will resume on Wednesday at 3:30.