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MidlandToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to an article about the Tiny Township budget, published Dec. 6.
I read your article about Tiny trying to whittle down the tax increase for 2025 to seven per cent with great disappointment.
Although better than the 9.78 per cent proposed originally, it would still bring this council’s three-year tax hike extravaganza to 28.29 per cent.
Tiny was offered a tremendous assist from the provincial government when they agreed to chip in to reduce policing costs for smaller municipalities. The idea was to help keep tax increases down. There were adjustments made through three days of budget deliberation, but if we took the $450,000 handout from the province you reported and applied it to the original 2025 budget, the rate should have dropped to 7.17 per cent, not 8.44 per cent, where we stand today (based on $172,153 representing a one per cent tax increase). What happened?
Tiny council, having found new money, started looking for ways to spend it rather than giving taxpayers a break as intended. They started by giving municipal employees a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) of 1.5 per cent on top of the regular raises they are going to receive. This was an item on the “funding gap” list or wish list that didn’t make the original budget. Cost to taxpayers: $100,000. COLA is an antiquated concept only used in certain entitled public organizations and a few union shops. Regular, hard-working taxpayers don’t get to double up.
They couldn’t justify this expenditure on the original bloated budget, but with new money came a new opportunity to spend more. They also turned to the wish list to add more costs to the budget to absorb the gift received from the province. They added $45,000 to repaint lines on a crosswalk. I’m not an expert on line painting, but that seems excessive and a cheaper solution would have been welcomed.
Let’s take a closer look at operating expenditures. The published budget document showed actual expenditures to the end of October were $16,607,766. (See line labelled “expenditures” for each cost centre in the budget report.) We can prorate this to year end many ways, but if we simply multiply this figure by 12/10, we get projected annual expenditures of $19,924,584 compared to the budget of $21,177,658, a saving of $1,253,074. (The saving is likely higher as costs in the last two months of the year should be lower given the seasonal residence effect.)
In my experience budgeting, I was typically told that my future budgeted expenditures were to be limited to an inflationary increase over the prior year actuals, or less. (Increases above inflation had to be financed through savings in other areas.) What would the tax increase for 2025 look like if Tiny restricted the increase in expenditures to inflation, roughly two per cent, over projected expenditures for 2024? The budget would have come in at $20,323,076, less than the 2024 budget and a potential tax reduction. In fact, they could have budgeted increases in expenditures of 6.3 per cent over 2024 projected actual and required no tax increase for 2025.
So, excuse me if I’m disappointed in the valiant effort of Tiny council to get the tax rate increase down to seven per cent.
Herb Huck
Tiny Township
