By Stephen Vance, Editor
Our new council has survived their first budget deliberation, and the end result should please just about everyone.
As fine a job as this council has done in their first few months, and with their first budget, the real praise and acknowledgement should be spread around a little beyond the current council and staff.
After enduring four years of what was to have been a five-year plan that saw the municipal portion of the property tax bills skyrocket in order to right Meaford’s financial ship after finding itself with $3 million in accumulated deficits, ratepayers in this municipality can breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that the 0.08 percent blended rate increase for 2015 won’t break the bank: in fact it’ll cost the average homeowner about the same as a half dozen cups of coffee.
While I’ve never made a secret of my aversion to ‘zero increase’ budgets, as they are unsustainable and can result in trouble down the road, the 0.08 percent blended rate increase that Meaford residents will pay in 2015 is a responsible increase. It covers the impacts of inflationary pressure, and ensures that the municipality isn’t digging itself another hole.
Not only is the rate increase tolerable, Meaford now has money in the bank – something we couldn’t say a few years ago after virtually every penny in the municipal coffers was drained in order to address the accumulated deficit. Over the last five years, Meaford’s long-term debt has declined and bank balances have increased, and for the last couple of years the municipality has taken on no new debt and that isn’t changing in 2015.
So, to the residents of Meaford who have been hemorrhaging from their cheque books over the last few years thanks to the large tax increases, a huge thanks is owed from council and staff – the increases hurt, and many in the community vented and made their frustration known, but most gritted their teeth and looked ahead to the day the ship would be righted.
Another round of thanks should go to the previous council. Every member of the previous council ran their 2010 campaigns expressing support for the then newly-established five-year plan. It can’t be easy to run for public office while promising voters that for the next five years their tax bills would rise as much as 10 percent per year on the municipal portion. It must have been even more difficult a few years in, when the increases really began to hurt ratepayers and council was under pressure to provide some relief.
So, to the previous council, it didn’t make you popular, but it did help the municipality out of a very large hole, and has resulted in a budget that residents of any municipality would be pleased with. There were many things about the previous council that I didn’t particularly like, but the fact that they stuck to their guns no matter how much heat they were experiencing certainly earned my respect.
This new council shows promise. Each and every member has been engaged in their first few months, they have all arrived at council and budget meetings armed with great questions and ideas, and they definitely deserve credit along with the current senior staff for the 2015 budget, but the road map to arrive at this budget was cobbled together by a previous council and a mostly different staff, and it was made possible, though painful, because whether they liked it or not, Meaford residents knew it had to be done.
Let’s not allow Meaford to find itself in the position it was five years ago ever again.
