In the second step of the Village of Pemberton’s (VOP) annual multi-step budget deliberation process, the village is showing an unaudited surplus carryover of $482,302, with changes still to come throughout the coming weeks.
However, when factoring in the drop from a more than $700,000 surplus carryover last year while operations budgets continue to increase—and the fact that village residents have seen lower tax increases in recent years (four per cent in 2021 and zero per cent in 2020)—another tax increase may be in the cards as the VOP looks to keep pace.
“I think we talked last year about having to look at, potentially, a 10-plus-per-cent tax increase if we don’t start doing smaller increases to carry that [surplus] forward,” said chief administrative officer Nikki Gilmore at the Feb. 22 VOP Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting.
“But that’s why we will most likely be asking council to maybe increase some of our operational expenses in light of a larger cost-of-living increase, because we really do need to start not coming in at a flat budget and making sure that we’re accounting for this decrease in that surplus carry forward.”
Over the last two years, VOP mayor and council made the decision to keep tax increases minimal to help “lighten the burden as much as we could on taxpayers,” said Mayor Mike Richman. However, that has put the village in a position where they “have a little catch-up to do.”
And with a 3.9-per-cent cost-of-living increase on the year, Councillor Ted Craddock doesn’t see any way the Village can go with a tax increase less than that.
“As much as none of us want to increase taxes, I would be pretty much hard-pressed to not go with four per cent … just to recover that so that we’re running equal,” he said.
“The budget obviously shows that we’re bringing forward quite a surplus from last year, but at this point, we don’t know exactly how close those numbers are. So if there’s $50,000 or $70,000, or $100,000 coming in, or something’s under budgeted, four per cent is barely going to put us on track.
“It’s a hard number to pull out right at the present time, and I hate to say it, but I certainly can’t see us going anything less than four per cent.”
Richman did note that currently the budget is showing a surplus, but to avoid the potential of eventually having to drop a 10- to 12-per-cent increase on taxpayers, incremental increases are needed starting this year.
His suggestion, which was eventually adopted by the committee, was for the VOP’s manager of finance Thomas Sikora to come back to the final tax implication session on March 8 with an updated report showing what increases of four to seven per cent would look like for taxpayers so the committee can make an informed decision.
During the Feb. 22 session, the committee also discussed changes made to the budget since the last meeting and anything that still needed to be updated moving forward.
One of the major alterations came in the form of the Public Works and Parks budget, which originally had a total of $662,000 allocated to the Pemberton Farm Road East Pathway project. The updated version was able to cut the total by more than $200,000 by removing the money for light posts and a flashing pedestrian crosswalk.
However, the councillors agreed that the safety of the crosswalk flashers, which accounted for $35,000 of the original budget, was a more pressing need than spending $45,938 to put down new asphalt in that section of the trail.
A motion to remove the asphalt budget and re-add the budget for the crosswalk flashers was ultimately carried by the committee, followed by a second motion stating that if a planned grant application for the village’s portion of funding is not successful, the project would be funded through gas tax and COVID restart funds.
