Tiny Township has settled on a staff target to lower the 2025 draft budget down from the decision of an 8.44% municipal tax rate increase, or 5.214% blended tax-rate increase.
Three straight days over roughly 14 hours of Tiny council pouring through the numbers brought the adjusted rates close to where council could be comfortable, but further tweaking was requested.
In the final directions of the special meeting of council, an agreement was made for staff to return by early January with roughly $80,000 further shaved off with an aim for a 7% municipal tax rate increase or 4.5% blended tax rate increase.
Municipalities have two parts: capital budgets (of what to run) and operations budgets (of how to run them).
In service level changes for operations, a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for the wages of full-time staff and council was approved for the budget-recommended amount of 1.5%, or $100,000 net of reserve funded salaries.
An economic reserve fund was earmarked using surplus funds from the prior year, instead of contributing approximately $85,000 to the Economic Development Corporation of North Simcoe as requested on the first day.
Making the largest factor in the budget was the OPP reduction of billing costs by approximately $450,000 from a provincial hand-out to municipalities for 2025.
Major decisions were made during the final half-hour stretch with the funding gap list, as council chose to invest nearly $120,000 into many fire and emergency services items to acknowledge the importance of upgrading firefighting ability and the Thunder Beach water system.
Hot-mix patching of Tiny’s extensive road network ($140,000) was to be funded through reserves, as was a ramp reconstruction for the Lafontaine Community Centre at $30,000 and a Toanche dog park ($30,000). Wyevale crosswalk repainting ($45,000) was also added.
Another large contribution to the municipality was through recommendations from the asset management plan for a 2.39% infrastructure tax levy increase.
“That’s a 53% increase in terms of infrastructure funding,” said Mayor Dave Evans as closing remarks to the budget discussions. “There’s a lot of good elements to this budget, and we can tweak it and get it down as close as we can without (losing) services. We should all be very happy and very proud of what we’ve accomplished the last three days.”
The 2025 draft budget can be viewed on the agenda page on the Township of Tiny website.
Archives of council meetings are available to view on the township’s YouTube channel.