When the calendar turns each year it is just natural to have one eye looking to the past year, and another focused in the 12-months to come.
It is rather easy to sum up 2017 in terms of our province and our city and that would be to declare the year one of tightening budgets.
The provincial budget dipped deep into the red and caused a number of huge cuts in the 2017 release budget.
The ramifications of the provincial budget are still rippling through the province and its people.
A general resident feels the effect every time they purchase something in a store since the provincial sales tax went up one per cent. That may not have seemed a big hike, but taxes are ultimately cumulative, and the overall impact hurt the bottom lines of most of us.
The cuts from the province hit the corporate city hard too.
As a result when it came to its municipal budget we felt more hurt.
Yorkton saw taxation revenue increases of 9.46 per cent in 2017, with 6.25 per cent of the increase deemed necessary to make up for provincial cuts to the city of some $901,000, noted Council.
“Council struggled to find options in an effort to maintain services and continue to fund necessary improvements to streets, underground infrastructure and drainage, said Mayor Bob Maloney in a release at the time. “Everything was on the table, and we want to make it clear that two thirds of the tax increase this year is due to provincial downloading.”
The eye focused on 2018 has a hard time seeing anything but tighter budgets yet to come, and that will mean another bite or two out of the bottom lines of Yorkton families.
There has been little to suggest the province will do better than it budgeted for. In fact, many lean toward the idea of a larger deficit than the government forecast.
Any losses beyond the budgeted levels will threaten the Saskatchewan Party’s plan to return to balanced budget on its announced timeframe, and will force further fiscal belt tightening from them.
That doesn’t bode well for any increase in funds to municipalities, and could mean deeper cuts.
Locally, Yorkton Council has suggested it wants to avoid anything close to a double digit increase in property taxes. That is a noble vision, but will be determined by what the province does, and what level of infrastructure renewal is deemed a minimum to keep with needs.
The best we might hope for would be the status quo, but increases from both levels of government seem a far more likely expectation of the year ahead.
