The Northeast’s three largest communities will have to look at raising taxes due to a reduction in provincial funding announced in the budget.
The province will no longer provide a grant from SaskEnergy and SaskPower to municipalities that’s based on the usage of facilities within their boundaries. Because of that, Melfort will lose $433,000, Nipawin will lose $102,000 and Tisdale will lose $75,000.
To make up that amount in property taxes, Melfort would have to raise theirs by eight per cent, Nipawin by 2.5 per cent and Tisdale by 2.5 per cent.
“The next budget meeting will be interesting in the sense that we’ll have some tough discussions to have, some tough decisions to make,” said Rick Lang, Melfort’s mayor, adding the city will have to look at tax increases, shifting some of its funding and finding cost savings. Before the provincial budget, Melfort was talking about a tax increase in the four to six per cent range.
“That’s a huge dollar amount to rationalize and so it could have a huge impact in the final tax number – and it won’t be pretty.”
Rennie Harper, Nipawin’s mayor, said her council would have to gather all of the data and get back to the table.
“We haven’t confirmed our budget totally yet, so we’ll go back to the table and consider how we’ll address that.”
“This council has done a lot of hard work getting the budget down to something palatable,” said Barry Elliott, the town’s administrator. “This set it back, no question, but, as the mayor indicated, we’ll take another look at it and give it a fresh set of considerations here.”
Al Jellicoe, Tisdale’s mayor, was more calm about that situation, saying his town would have to tighten its belt for a year or two until it gets back on track.
“There was consensus that maybe we could get away with a very small tax increase, but I [now] think it’s going to be three to four per cent,” he said. We’re probably going to defer some capital purchases for a year. Any cuts, they’ll be small cuts.”
The change to the SaskEnergy and SaskPower grants were unexpected.
“This was a complete and utter surprise. There was no indication,” Elliott said. “Even within the SUMA group, there was no consultation.”
What was expected was a slight reduction to revenue sharing, which is based on the amount raised by one percentage point of the PST two years ago. All of the mayors were glad that remained.
As for the $400,000 cut to the Wapiti Regional Library – 58 per cent of its budget – all of the mayors had no idea how that would affect their bottom lines.
Lang said in his opinion, the budget downloaded too much onto the hands of municipalities. Harper said she expects more effects of the provincial budget are yet to be revealed.
“It will hit a lot of our residents, probably in ways we don’t know yet.”
