Turner Valley residents could see lower property tax bills this year.
Town council unanimously accepted administration’s proposed $5.68 million operating budget at its March 14 budget meeting. The approved budget comes in more than a million dollars less than the initial proposal of $6.85 million in December and will represent a 3.84 per cent reduction from the 2017 operating municipal budget.
Turner Valley Mayor Gary Rowntree promised residents a review of the town’s operating budget and reduced spending in last fall’s municipal election campaign.
He said the operating budget is a good start.
“I’m very pleased with it considering that we only have an interim CAO right now and, like I pointed out in my preamble at the meeting yesterday, the people we were working with were not the decision makers from the past,” he said last week.
Rowntree said the operating budget will come before council for final approval in April. Work will begin on the Town’s capital budget shortly afterwards.
The final tax rate will be set after the Province determines education requisition amounts.
Town councillors rejected four proposed operating budgets over the last three months – each time demanding lower numbers.
“They sent us back to the books because they didn’t like the format of it,” said Heather Thomson, interim chief administrative officer.
After the first budget plan was rejected in December Town administration presented a second proposed budget of just over $6 million. It was sent back to the drawing board to create a third budget plan of just under $6 million. It too wasn’t accepted, said Thomson.
“We really dug in and sharpened our pencils,” she said. “We believe we did a really good job doing that.”
Thomson said council directed department managers to review and reduce contracted services, goods, materials, supplies and membership, training and conference costs.
“We made further reductions,” she said. “We just kept looking at everything. We were looking at the year-end actuals because we didn’t have those very clear. The departments reduced $114,516 in total.”
Thomson said the biggest reduction was made in public works’ common services.
“We reduced contract services without jeopardizing the service,” she said. “The second biggest reduction was in administration and planning.”
Council froze wages and new hiring. It also cancelled the storefront improvement program that provided funding to assist businesses interested in making aesthetic improvements last year.
Thomson said she’s happy with the final operating budget numbers.
“It gives council the opportunity to decrease the mill rate,” she said. “It’s great and we’ll be putting forward the whole package for acceptance.”
Rowntree said council and administration went through the budget line by line and requested departments determine unnecessary expenses and make adjustments accordingly.
“The administration went back and really determined the wants and the needs and cut the fat where they could,” he said. “We are sticking with the needs right now. It was a common sense approach.”
Rowntree said council ensured essential services would not be impacted.
“It’s not so much cut, cut, cut, it’s finding efficiencies in operations that also has an effect on spending and costs,” he said. “We felt that that was a good baseline to enable a new CAO to come in without affecting our services and be able to give him or her something to work with and not affect the operations of the services to our residents.”
Former CAO after Barry Williamson retired, with his last day on Jan. 5.
Rowntree said they are currently in the interview process to hire a replacement.
“We’ve had some good candidates come forward and we are in the final stages of making our decision,” he said. “Council will be looking for the new CAO to look for more efficiencies throughout the following years so we’re looking at improvements again for the 2019 budget.”
