Early 2015 budget deliberations continued at City Hall during a special committee meeting on Wednesday night, with city staff fielding questions from councillors regarding the proposed water and sewer operating budget. That proposed budget would require a 3.68 per cent ($721,129) increase over last year's budget. PHOTO BY LIAM BERTI
With 2015 budget talks just now getting underway because of the fall election, a special committee meeting was held on Wednesday night where council questioned the proposed water and sewer operating budget.
City of North Bay staff’s suggested operating budget would require an increase of $721,129, or 3.68 per cent, over last year's budget.
“To me, that’s a significant number that’s on the table,” said Coun. Chris Mayne, vice-chair of the engineering and works committee. “But right now, I feel like an increase of about $700,000 is a realistic projection and I look forward to supporting it in the budget process.”
Roughly 2.5 per cent of that increase would be directly related to the city’s Asset Management Plan, or infrastructure spending. As the city staff alluded to many times during Wednesday night’s discussion, the impact of the city’s infrastructure spending and investment is already paying off.
The Asset Management Plan report, completed by Stantec, indicates that North Bay’s infrastructure is, in fact, slowly improving and that the city is thus recognizing fewer emergency repairs.
According to city statistics, the short-term trend shows that water and sewers repaired 67 broken mains and 108 service leaks in 2013, while the most up-to-date numbers from 2014 show 47 broken mains and 103 service leaks.
The water distribution system, including mains, valves, hydrants and services, is made up of 15,500 service connections, roughly 304 kilometres of water main and some 2,500 valves.
However, the proposed budget does not contain a contingency fund, nor does it include any contributions to the reserves. As has been the case in every budget process, emergency repairs and unplanned factors can impact municipal costs, resulting in variances in the actual cost.
Elsewhere in the proposed budget, the city is projecting that hydro and gas utility costs will increase by five per cent, while their insurance is optimistically estimated to increase by 10 per cent, but could be closer to 20 per cent.
As the report states, the proposed budget used the lowest cost estimates to deliver existing levels of service to the taxpayers of the city.
Staff also highlighted the fact that this year’s budgeting projecting process required a change of philosophy, whereby the front line city staff were consulted to strengthen the correlation between operations and financial reporting.
One of the big concerns going into the discussions was avoiding what happened in the 2014 budget; that is, underestimating their expenses and having to turn to their reserve funds.
“This year we are looking at realistic increases,” said Mayne. “We are not trying to pick random numbers and bring forward arbitrary, optimistic projections and get caught like we did last year.”
Coun. Mike Anthony questioned the city staff on their projected overtime figures, which are estimated to come in at $383,000. Anthony asked if other municipalities offered a more cost-effective staff scheduling system, such as staggered-crew scheduling or acquiring an emergency crew, thus reducing overtime costs.
“I guess what I’m trying to do is see that overtime number trimmed down,” Anthony put simply. “It’s still a very large number, to me, so I’m trying to figure out if there is a way to investigate to see if there are other communities that might do something differently.”
Putting an end to the speculative discussion, Coun. Daryl Vaillancourt chimed in on the issue and ultimately requested that city staff conduct a report on the matter.
Mayne, who was acting-chair of the committee in chairwoman Tanya Vrebosch’s absence, ultimately decided to leave the budget talks on the committee level for further discussion before advancing it.
City staff also pointed to the fact that 2015 represents a transition year in which water metres have been installed and are being used to determine rates.
With the 2015 budget being the first under water metre billing, the operation budget timeline will merge with Hemson Consulting’s water rates study. A public meeting is expected to be held sometime in February.
