During my time on city council in Barrie, I could never quite figure out if the budget was the most important or the least important thing we did all year.
On the one hand, what is officially known as the business plan sets the spending for the upcoming year and, thus, determines services levels and what projects the city will undertake along with setting the tax level paid by all property owners in Barrie. Furthermore, the budget determines the fees for everything from parking to transit to building permits.
On the other hand, the vast majority of the spending in the budget is predetermined by what has happened in previous years. It’s not like the city is going to eliminate the building department or our snow-plowing fleet. Those costs are pretty well built into city operations, as is the 44 per cent of the budget determined by service partners and education.
If you were being somewhat uncharitable, you could say what council does is “tinker” with the remaining parts of the city spending where there is some flexibility. A few dollars are trimmed here and money is shifted from one reserve to another there with all the predictability of the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL playoffs.
All the hard slogging has already been done by city staff in the previous months to bring in a budget that will be acceptable to council and the public.
About the only new twist in this year’s budget discussions was the decision to hold off passing the portion controlled by the service partners – such as the police, library and county – until March 8.
Perhaps that lets council draw attention to the fact there is no tax increase to cover the cost of city operations in 2023, but even that is not new.
Despite the perception among some residents that city spending is out of control, there was no tax increase to cover the cost of city operations in the vast majority of the budgets passed during my time on city council.
In fact, I liked to point out to people that almost the entire tax increase over one 10-year period went to fund the city’s $52.5-million commitment to the hospital, certainly a worthy cause and one supported by residents, but also one which wasn’t part of our mandate.
This isn’t to criticize the current City of Barrie budget. Council and staff had a big challenge in these inflationary times and managed to minimize the tax increase, apparently without cutting services while also managing to add a few things, such as reopening recreation centres on weekends and some improvements to winter control – what most people call snow plowing.
And, at the end of the day, I never came across many residents who looked at their tax bills beyond the bottom line. They didn’t care whether the money was going to city operations or service partners. They didn’t care whether there was a one per cent or two per cent infrastructure levy. It was all taxes.
Barry Ward is a veteran editor and journalist who also served on Barrie city council for 22 years. Fair Comment appears regularly in BarrieToday.
