Nipawin council has made a few changes to its proposed budget, reducing the tax levy increase required from four per cent to 2.5.
“The conversation we had was we had some goals for ourselves and the goal was we didn’t want to go higher than four per cent,” said Rennie Harper, Nipawin’s mayor, after a special council meeting Feb. 21. “If we could go lower, we were wanting to do that, but we were sure we weren’t going to let it go higher than four per cent.”
The proposed budget still features equipment purchases, upgrades to the arena and Evergreen, a new finance staffer, new accounting software, paperless council meetings and no reduction to services.
“We kept talking about what are the things we might do or might not do and we were able to save a little bit here and there,” Harper said.
One area where major savings were found was in the fire department.
Fire chief Brian Starkell told council the firefighters got together and decided they would reduce the number of weekends they would be on-call. Last year, they were on-call from the May long weekend to October. This year, they’ll be on-call the May long weekend, the June/July long weekend, all weekends in July and August, and the September long weekend.
As well, there will be five firefighters on duty for on-call weekends instead of six.
The move is expected to reduce wage costs from a budgeted $203,000 in 2017 to $182,000 this year.
Starkell told council those changes won’t harm service quality.
“The risk there is minimal,” Harper said. “You still have mutual aid, you can still call people out, all of that. It’s just that it won’t be formal, on call paid.”
The department also cut out high angle training and cut its advertising budget, used for fire prevention week, from $404 to $212.
The total fire budget will go from a budgeted $581,000 in 2017 to $563,000.
Harper said she was pleased with the fire department’s efforts.
“We’re very proud of our fire department, especially the fact that they decided that those were the changes they were going to make.”
The town will also be putting $17,700 into reserves to pay for future upgrades into infrastructure like sidewalks.
“That was one of our other goals: that we wanted to start to do a little bit of longer range planning and start to put some money away so that we’re not always having to dip into savings and that we have some money set aside,” Harper said.
The budget is expected to be voted on at Feb. 26’s council meeting. There could be changes later if the province decides to make cuts to municipal funding in its April budget.
“We obviously don’t know yet what the effect of the provincial budget's going to be because there could well be an effect from that, but we’ll have to look at it once we know what that is.”
The actual tax rates are still to be determined.
