Fellow Squamish councillors this week rebuffed an effort by Coun. Ron Sander that sought to benchmark a 5 per cent tax municipal tax increase as a starting point for substantive council budget deliberations.
Speaking at council's third 2013 budget workshop on Tuesday (March 12), Sander put forward his motion because he wanted "to give staff something specific to work on and not just have meeting on meeting where we try to push the Play-Doh together, but instead start to work toward a specific goal."
When the draft budget was presented to council on Feb. 26, it included a projected 12.1 per cent property tax increase. On March 5, council voted to put cash from District of Squamish RCMP and labour-cost contingency funds -more than $600,000 in 2013 - toward the operating budget, which would shrink the increase to approximately 8.8 per cent.
On Tuesday, though, Sander said he didn't think even that was affordable for business and residential property owners.
"At the end of the day, there's one taxpayer and on that end this sort of an increase is not sustainable," he said. "We're going to bankrupt homeowners. We're going to put people out of business I think we need something that's sustainable."
Coun. Patricia Heintzman said she shared Sander's frustration over the lack of a concrete target in the ongoing discussions. Heintzman said that while she had reservations, she could live with the approach suggested by Sander.
Coun. Bryan Raiser, though, said the time to suggest such a target would have been during pre-budget discussions in January.
"The time to pursue this goal was back [in January] but just to try and willy-nilly pull a number out of the air and then have staff scramble and try to accomplish that, I think, is a waste of time," Raiser said.
"To just throw out a number, I think, ignores all the work that has been done to date, and I think the percentage and analysis will come out of the discussions that have yet to come in our meetings," Mayor Rob Kirkham said.
Sander's motion was defeated 5-2, with Sander and Heintzman voting in favour.
Later, Coun. Doug Race suggested revisiting the decision to invoke the RCMP and labour-cost contingencies. Race, who voted in favour of the move at the March 5 meeting, said he'd been having second thoughts.
Using those contingencies to reduce taxes for one year doesn't seem like an efficient use of the money, he said. Instead, he suggested using the overall $1.2 million RCMP cost contingency to reduce the amount of money -$9.3 million in the initial draft budget -that the district plans to borrow.
"The increase in police costs is not what those monies were ever taxed for," Race said. "To me it's not an efficient use of that money because we're going to be, in effect, using that money and paying it back over 20 years at four per cent. That's just not efficient."
Race's suggestion was deferred to later in council's budget talks. Joanne Greenlees, the district's manager of finance, said that while talk of reducing borrowing costs "does my treasurer's heart good," she added, "In this instance I'm inclined to recommend that we put it toward that purpose [reducing taxes] because that's why we put that money aside."
