With roughly $30 million to work with, Williams Lake city council and staff are in the throws of finalizing the 2018 budget.
They’ve had open budget meetings at committee of the whole and will meet again Monday, March 12 from 1 to 3 p.m.
“We are trying not to increase the tax rate, although some people’s taxes will go up if their assessments went up,” Cobb said Thursday. “The province sets the assessments, we set the mill rate and right now our tax rate is $5.79 per $1,000 of assessed value.”
Cobb said one of the biggest increases in the budget in 2018 is for policing costs, which will go from $4,494,584 in 2017 to a projected $4,932,422 in 2018.
“We have no control over policing costs, they are set by the province and the federal government,” he explained, noting the increase of $437,838 in policing will have to be absorbed so council and staff will need to make cuts elsewhere.
Those cuts will most likely be in capital spending because the city does not want to cut services, he said.
The Williams Lake Fire Dept. needs to replace one of its trucks, but Cobb is hoping they can ask the fire commissioner if they can put that purchase off until next year.
One of the capital expenditures that needs to remain on the books is paving and $1.2 million has been budgeted for it in 2018.
There is some money left from 2017’s paving budget because of the early snowfall in October that shut down operations, so that will be used in 2018 as well, he said.
On the debt front, Cobb said since his council was elected in 2014, the debt has dropped from $14,137,787 to $11,274,682.
In the future, maintaining a zero per cent tax rate increase won’t be as easy, he admitted.
“We’ve done it for three years, but can’t necessarily continue because there’s inflation alone,” he added. “If we were to raise property taxes by two percent, on an average home assessed at $213,000 it would mean an additional $24 a year.”
