Stratford councilors concluded two full days of budget deliberations last week with a proposed 2024 budget that includes a record-high 12.48 per cent net tax levy increase over 2023.
After a couple of marathon budget sessions, the current state of Stratford’s draft 2024 budget suggests city residents, businesses and property owners could be on the hook for the largest property tax increase in recent memory.
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At the outset of Thursday’s all-day budget meeting of the finance and labor relations committee, the draft budget was introduced with a proposed $80.7-million net tax levy, a roughly 10.5 per cent hike from this year’s roughly $73-million net tax levy. Because the city saw $69 million in property assessment growth this year, the total tax rate increase for 2024 was actually close to 8.3 per cent over last year.
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“Based on our 2023 tax levy, we’re looking at an additional requirement of dollars by about 10 per cent to get us to $7.6 (million above last year’s levy). … One of (our main impacts) is wages. That’s kind of a common effect for many municipalities. We’ve got collective agreements, we’ve got (consumer price index) and indexing occurring, and we’ve got other effects that happen in this grouping where we talk a lot about … wages and employer costs,” city treasurer Karmen Krueger told councilors Thursday.
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Other items impacting the proposed increase include an additional $5 million for the city’s capital reserves to cover the costs of infrastructure and other capital projects included in Stratford’s underfunded 10-year capital plan, as well as the costs of new climate change initiatives and increases in the city’s costs for shared services and outside boards, like Stratford police and the public library.
Krueger told councilors the city intends to use all parking revenues from 2024 and previous budget surpluses, as well as some other organizational efficiencies and transfers from other reserves, to offset some of the city’s increased costs for next year.
Following a presentation of the city’s $43.8-million capital budget, which is funded through the city’s capital reserves and largely focuses this year on road and city building and facilities renewals, as well as departmental overviews, councilors had the opportunity to discuss a number of expansion requests for new staff and service improvements proposed for next year.
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These included $120,000 for a municipal facilities space utilization master plan, $150,000 to establish a new incentives fund for community improvement projects, $215,000 to service vacant city land for affordable housing projects, $500,000 for the development of new two-storey, 12-unit affordable and transitional housing project at 398 Erie St., and $150,000 to support the Lights On Stratford winter festival of lights. New staffing requests included $80,000 for a full-time housing concierge, nearly $71,000 for an asset management manager, $118,000 for a bylaw officer, nearly $104,000 for a climate change co-ordinator, and more than $50,000 for a resource teacher in the social services department .
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In total, all of the expansion requests represented an additional $1.7 million, or another 2.28 per cent increase to the net tax levy in 2024.
The only request that councilors voted not to approve and instead deferred to the 2025 budget was $80,000 to create a parks and recreation master plan. While city staff suggested the plan was critical for both the city’s community services and building departments, councilors deemed it unnecessary for next year.
The committee also voted to allocate $75,000 – nearly all of its tourism tax revenue collected so far this year – to cover half of the $150,000 request by Destination Stratford for Lights On Stratford in 2024-2025.
On the staffing side, all of the new staff positions were approved, with the exception of the climate change coordinator, which was deferred to 2025. If approved as part of the overall budget, the cost in next year’s budget for new staff positions will be reduced by half since the city will split those salary costs between next year’s budget and the 2025 budget.
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In total, the approved requests brought the proposed net levy increase for 2024 to nearly 12.5 per cent, and increased the proposed 2024 tax rate to just shy of 10 per cent.
“I really feel like we need to send this back,” Coun. Cody Sebben said at the end of last week’s second full day of budget deliberations. “I think a 10 per cent increase is unacceptable. …Staff are the ones who know the departments and work on this full time all year. We can go through it here and see what we can find, and we can talk about some of the bigger items, but I think we really need to send this back.”
Sebben’s attempts to remove some capital projects and expansion requests from the proposed 2024 budget during these deliberations were unsuccessful.
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“We could ask staff to bring (the budget) back and find efficiencies. I’m not sure that’s going to be possible,” Mayor Martin Ritsma said. “I think us, as council, have to decide: what services are we going to decrease or what user fees are we going to increase? We will have another chance where this (budget) will come back. For us, I think we need some time to decide whether we want to adjust services because what staff was commissioned to do was to bring back their recommended costs based on maintaining the services we currently have … that our residents have asked for repeatedly. There’s the challenge, I believe. It’s up to us as individual council members.”
Budget deliberations will continue in mid-January 2024.
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