To say the least, the preliminary City of Yorkton budget unveiled at the Committee of the Whole meeting of Council Tuesday, Feb. 21 was an interesting one.
Others might term it a shocking one as the combined capital and operating budgets as revealed would necessitate a 6.68 per cent increase in taxation.
“Currently Administration is proposing a 6.68 per cent increase in taxation revenue for the 2017 year. This includes 2.94 per cent for future capital projects, 2.50 per cent increase for police and fire protection services and 1.24 per cent for all other operational expenditures,” Shannon Bell, director of finance told the meeting.
Bell went on to note the initial operating budget brought to Council at a closed door meeting was actually suggesting a much higher increase.
That operating budget was presented with an 11.34 per cent increase to taxation revenue.
To the credit of Council and Administration they have pared that back.
But what was the process?
What did the individual councillors suggest, argue for, support and defend through all those closed door sessions?
Those seem questions voters deserve answers to, especially in light of having elected five new members of Council last October.
It would be interesting to have seen just how each new councillor reacted through their first truly big challenge since being elected.
There are things Council should keep behind closed doors, specific discussions on specific personnel, legal affairs of the City, and property sales, for obvious reasons.
Deciding where to spend taxpayer dollars in a budget are not on the keep secret list, and more specifically how they made the decisions where to spend the dollars.
The word transparency was a catch word for a number of the 24 candidates for Council last year, including some the voters chose to elect. Perhaps they could have started greater transparency by letting the public in on the debate leading up to last week’s budget unveiling.
It is all well-and-good that the document is now online at the City website allowing for review before the budgets are passed near the end of March at the earliest. But reasonably most will not delve into the line-by-line numbers.
Far more would have followed media coverage of the debate of Council during the decision making process. That is why there are newspapers, radio, and television, to get the news of events to the masses.
After the talk of transparency in the last election voters deserved to be able to see inside the process to see how their recently elected representatives of Council achieved the numbers finally revealed, but alas that did not happen.
One has to wonder why it didn’t.
