Did you know that every year, council and staff at the District develop and adopt a five-year Financial Plan?
All municipalities are required to adopt a five-year Financial Plan yearly under the Community Charter, the key piece of legislation that governs most municipalities in B.C.
And we must do so prior to adopting a property tax bylaw that formalizes the revenue a municipality needs to fulfill the year’s work plan, essentially the budget, and results in the collection of your taxes.
Pretty exciting stuff I know.
But the five-year Financial Plan is far more than a legislated exercise and not something a municipality randomly scratches out on the back of a napkin on a whim. It is a comprehensive and strategic budgetary framework that outlines and manages revenues, resources and expenditures for the municipality over a five-year period.
The backbone of the plan is the many management plans and strategies that councils past and present have developed to ensure that we are making clear, purposeful decisions, and planning for the future responsibly in all departments. They include strategic master planning documents such as: council’s Strategic Plan, Recreation Services Master Plan, Public Works Asset Management Plan, Squamish Master Fire Plan and the Long-term Financial Plan to name a few. These help inform when, for example, we need a new fire hall or additional playing fields or a new sheet of ice… not only when we need them but when we can afford them (these two don’t always coincide unfortunately).
These strategies also include service increases that are often driven by population demand like when to add new bus routes and buses, bylaw officers, police and fire fighters.
The budget and the five-year Financial Plan are also informed by comprehensive analyses such as the Integrated Flood Hazard Management Plan (recently adopted and probably the most comprehensive and progressive approach to dikes and flood planning in the province), the safe routes to school program, the emergency program, the multi modal transportation and the active transportation plans, again to name just a few. And new strategies currently being developed like the long-term real estate and facilities strategy, and of course the Official Community Plan.
What it doesn’t include are things that are not within our jurisdiction like hospital upgrades, new schools or school facility improvements, highway improvements and highway interchanges or anything else that is the purview of the provincial or federal governments.
Yearly budgets are not done on a whim.
They are thoughtful, strategic and comprehensive, a balancing act of priorities and perspectives, and are at their best when municipalities plan well and when citizens participate.
On Tuesday we kicked off Budget 2018. More information is online, Squamish.ca/budget.
Let’s talk.
