At the start of the 2007 budget, I have the following thoughts about the state of the community's finances. I am open to changing my thoughts before I vote, and am actively seeking your comments here and will be seeking your comments through many other methods over the next couple of months. I will do my utmost to vote in the best interests of the community at large.
As it stand right now, I have reservations about voting for even the minimum tax increase that has been talked about - 1% for major industry, 2.5% to 3% for other commercial and all residential taxpayers. I say this with utmost respect and admiration for the work of city staff and my council colleagues, past and present. I simply want to suggest that there might be a different way to look at the budget this year.
Here is my thinking at this moment:
1) Over the past 3 years, city hall has been funding many new substantial projects. These include the new water treatment plant, the new tournament capital sports facilities, the new central maintenance yard, the new garbage utility, the new curbside recycling program, and the purchase of the old courthouse building. I seem to remember the Mel Rothenburger's last term as mayor was termed his "bricks and mortar" term. Now, I supported most of these projects. But, I think its time to give the community a break from all such a fast pace of spending. And, in fact, to try our best to be as frugal as possible. As I will get to, there will be some very large unavoidable, and perhaps unexpected, expenses in the years shortly to come.
2) The current Council directive to staff is to assume we want to, at the very least. maintain the exact same level of service year after year. But I wonder about that directive. I think we should be looking across the organization to assess key city services and programs against current and future needs. To my way of thinking, some times programs need to be tweaked and even ended, so we can meet current needs and desires in the community. I think the current directive leads to almost inevitable growth in city programs and budgets, beyond the rate of inflation.
3) Granted I am not a professional crystal ball gazer, but I do predict at least a few very large and very unavoidable expenses in Kamloops' near future. We have known for a while now that we will need to build a new waste water / sewage treatment plant sometime in the near future. City senior managers have alerted us that we will have a very large batch of infrastructure upgrades come due in the near future. I also worry about the effects of climate change on the ability of our water treatment plant to access river water. River levels in 2006 were lower than we have seen in a long time. As our regional snow packs start to melt earlier and become less stable, we might need to expend a lot of resources ensuring our fresh water supply. Presently, the city reserve fund is probably half of the minimum suggested by the BC municipal finance officers association.
4) Through this all, I don't have any substantial way to gauge how City managers measure efficiency within city operations. I think the world of the vast majority of city staff but I think it would be good for city hall and the community at large if we could continually measure our efficiency, and communicate that to the public. I don't mean that we be draconian with our staff - but that we give them all the tools and assistance to be as productive as possible. I think Council should find some way to lead with action, not just words, in this effort.
The upshot of this is that I think we need to think more frugally with the city budget than we have for the past few years. I am not sure what the appropriate tax rate should be. Compared to other cities in BC I have heard about, our proposed tax increase seems lower than the average actually. (Mind you, we also have to look at utility fee increases, which are accounted for separately.) But, maybe that is the wrong benchmark. Maybe, we should look at how much we have been asking out of people's pockets for the past few years, and what kind of large bills are anticipated in the near future.
