Everyone is invited to the Sports Centre Lounge at McArthur Island tonight (Thurs, Mar. 10) to have your say on this year’s municipal budget.
The session gets underway starting at 7:00 and is focusing on the 12 supplemental items. Those include the funding strategy for the Community Climate Action Plan, public wi-fi, improvements to NorBrock Stadium and additional washroom and change room space at Overlander Park. The full list of items can be found here.
Kamloops Mayor Ken Christian says it has had good conversations with groups like the chamber, but this is an opportunity for the general public to weigh in on a very challenging budget year. He mentions how 2.5% of the 4.89% increase as the budget is currently proposed is a result of the Kamloops RCMP contract. “For my money I believe they’re worth it and I believe that they have been under paid and we need to get them into the realm of other police forces in Canada. That said, this only leaves us about 2.4% that we can actually work with in terms of finding efficiencies.”
Finance Director Kathy Humphrey was a guest on the NL Morning News this week. She spoke to some of the budget challenges that could crop up as a result of increases to things like fuel prices and interest rates.
“From the time we presented the budget in December there is actually quite a lot of things that have changed. The most recent one and the one that’s obvious to everybody else is gas prices. But public health orders have changes, so we’re also looking at do we have some increased revenues now that we’re allowed full capacity events and stuff that’s coming on. So those impacts are actually on the positive side.”
Humphrey notes that a conservative approach is always taken when creating a financial plan to be as prepared for those variables. “That’s sort of one of the things that we try to reiterate to people when they’re asking ‘why did you assume this or why did you assume that?’ Really for council, that is one of the main reasons why we set aside a reserve fund to try and off-set the highs and lows. Whether it is gas prices or tremendous amounts of snow. All those factors we try to factor in, we just don’t know the specifics at the time of the budget.”
Those who attend tonight’s meeting will have a chance to review and discuss the provisional budget and proposed supplemental budget items before the 2022 budget and tax requirements are finalized in May.
