Nipawin’s Business Improvement District is raising the alarm, saying if it doesn’t have any idea what its budget will be within a few weeks, it might have to suspend operations.
The district’s executive director, Eve O’Leary, will move on to a new job when her contract is over at the end of December.
“Because of that, we need to get moving on our position and we’ve been expressing that to the town,” said Tom Weegar, the district’s chair. “We need to get an allocation for our budget, we need to know how much we’ve got, we need to get moving here.”
For its last budget, the district received money from the town, plus some extra money from grants.
“We end up leveraging the funding we get from the town to get a significant additional amount of funds from external sources outside the community we wouldn’t otherwise get,” Weegar said.
For the upcoming budget, the town is planning to fund the district – and many other organizations – through a fee-for-service model, something it says will allow it to better keep track of how taxpayer dollars are spent. Weegar said he’s hesitant about that because the district is almost a quasi-municipal body that helps the town with economic development.
Weegar and the district would like to activate its ability to charge each business property owner in town a levy, but that’s something council would have to approve. Earlier this year, council voted to change the language in the business improvement district’s bylaw. Instead of the bylaw saying that it shall charge a levy, it now says it may charge a levy.
“Most businesses are actually in favour of us moving forward on that so we have a higher level of accountability with them and we can generate a bit of revenue, but apparently they [council] are a bit nervous about it,” Weegar said.
Weegar said the district’s board decided at its meeting Nov. 30 that it would continue operations as normal for the moment to give the town a bit more time to decide what it would do about the budget. He said the town is saying they support the district, but the district wants them to put their money where their mouth is.
“We need to know what level of support we have and if we don’t have a level of support, well, then we do have to think about what our operations are going to look like and whether we can afford to continue.”
