In an unprecedented move, District of Squamish council defeated the first three readings of their annual financial plan during Tuesday's (May 1) council meeting, after already approving it in principle during a committee of the whole meeting one week earlier.
"It's ridiculous," said Mayor Ian Sutherland, shortly before the proposed financial plan was defeated in a 4-2 vote. "It's just ridiculous that we're doing this after four months of budget meetings."
With Coun. Mike Jenson absent, councillors Corinne Lonsdale, Greg Gardner, Patricia Heintzman and Raj Kahlon voted against adopting this year's budget, which included an 11 per cent average tax increase for residences and eight per cent for businesses.
The vote was unusual, given that Kahlon, Heintzman, and Gardner had voted in favour of the document just seven days earlier.
"We went through every possible combination of rate increases, five of the seven of us said we were ok with increases of 11 and eight this year," said Sutherland. "It is insulting to staff who have worked on this to go back and question every item of the budget over again."
In defeating the motion, councillors did not take issue with the tax rates, but said that they could not support it because the budget process itself was flawed.
"Over and over again as we went through this there were items that we said we would come back to and look at again," said Lonsdale, who along with Jenson did not support the original motion. "We never did that, we were never given the chance to do that."
"There were numerous items in the budget that were never discussed," agreed Heintzman. "I think we need to work on it more, and if it takes us coming back and spending more time on it, I'm willing to do that. I think the taxpayers of Squamish deserve better. I don't think we're there yet."
Heintzman said that while she did vote in favour of the rate proposal, she thought at the time that meant they.
"I feel like I owe an apology," said Heintzman. "I don't think it was one of our shining moments," she added in an interview with The Chief. "I was willing to stay there for another five hours and discuss the budget further, but the next thing I knew the meeting was being closed."
In the week in between the two meetings, Heintzman said that she attempted to get council together to further discuss the budget but that she received no response back.
Sutherland said that there were plenty of opportunities for council to further discuss issues prior to approving the budget in principle.
"The process has been that anyone could bring something forward at anytime," he said during Tuesday's council deliberations. "I asked three times last week if anyone had anything else they wanted to discuss, and no one brought anything up. Short of being a mind reader, I don't know how I can bring items back up if they won't say them out loud."
On more than one occasion prior to the defeat of the budget, voices were raised by council. A number of times Sutherland urged councillors to trust what district staff deemed important for their budgets.
"We may as well get rid of our department heads and we can run the whole place ourselves because clearly you're a better finance director, you're a better planner, you're a better administrator," Sutherland told Lonsdale and Heintzman.
"We might be," retorted Lonsdale.
When Sutherland asked Lonsdale to apologize to district staff for her comments, she said, "I think you should apologize to councillor Heintzman and myself. I'm tired of you always correcting on me."
The budget failure came after an attempt by Heintzman and Lonsdale to remove the financial plan from the agenda in its entirety."If we had not been forced to vote on it at that time, we could have gone back in to it, and got our questions answered instead of having to defeat it," said Heintzman.
While most opposing councillors wanted the opportunity to look at the budget further, Kahlon voted against it because he saw it as an opportunity to help reduce the long-term debt the municipality is using to finance capital spending.
"We have already talked about taking any extra cuts we can do to the budget and putting it towards not having to go into debt for our capital projects," said Kahlon. "It is getting out of control and any opportunity to bring it down I will support."
During the most heated moments of debate, Mackenzie cautioned council against straying too far from the topic at hand.
"We are getting off the point, and we are losing sight of the big picture," said Mackenzie who in a later interview with the Chief noted that some members of council might be "more concerned about playing to the cameras than doing the job we're there to do."
Now that the budget failed its first motions council will have to have at least three additional meetings to discuss it.
"We'll have to have one meeting to look at it again, then another one for the first three readings, and then we have to wait at least 24 hours before fourth reading," said Sutherland.
Council is on a tight timeline as the budget must be sent to the province no later than May 14.
"If we blow the deadline the provincial government can come in and force us to decide on a budget, or if they wanted they can even step in and put someone in to govern instead of council," said Sutherland. "After what happened it wouldn't be a stretch to go there. I think we set a new precedent in B.C. After a year and a half of our council term we have achieved nothing. It's becoming more apparent today that people are more concerned about running for mayor in 2008 then running the district today."
A budget strategy session is scheduled for Monday (May 7) at 4:30 p.m. followed by a special council meeting Tuesday (May 8) at 5 p.m. to give the budget another first three readings.
