If you have tuned in to the first two full days of council’s discussion of the 2025 municipal budget, you already know it has been unlike anything we have ever seen. It has been two full days, 15 hours worth, of discussions, and councillors are more confused and frustrated than before they began, as is the public no doubt.
Unlike traditional municipal draft budgets that are presented to council in the form of an operating budget and a capital budget, with the budget year’s expenses and revenues compared to the current and previous years, with a clear indication of how much extra the next year’s budget will cost ratepayers, this year’s draft budget, presented by our recently hired CAO, was broken into ‘core services’ and ‘elective services’, something that has caused members of council much confusion, and not just because one of the largest budget items, Policing, was included in the ‘elective services’.
As presented to council on November 4, the draft 2025 ‘core budget’ calls for a rate increase of 6.33 percent, a number not outside of what council and the public might expect in a first draft of a municipal budget. But that number, including the financial impact presented for an average property owner, doesn’t tell the full story. As we have learned through last week’s two full days of budget discussions, if council were to approve the full budget as presented, all core and elective services, the increase for ratepayers would be 36 percent.
As I write this editorial on Tuesday morning, I am preparing for day three of council’s budget discussions. Going into Tuesday’s meeting, council still has more than 25 of the ‘elective services’ to discuss and consider. By the end of Friday’s budget meeting, with the electives that council had already approved and put back into the budget, the required rate increase for 2025 is already in excess of 19 percent. And with some important ‘elective services’ still to come, that number will be higher by the time you read this editorial.
Once council has completed their discussions regarding the remaining ‘elective’ services, the CAO and staff will go back to the drawing board to prepare ‘version two’ of the 2025 draft budget, and then the really hard work will begin for council as they attempt to whittle down a rate increase that will very likely be well in excess of 20 percent.
During Friday’s budget meeting, councillors spent a significant amount of time questioning the CAO about the employees that she has hired thus far as well as the requests for more new employees contained within the ‘elective’ portion of the budget.
Asked about the municipal hiring policy, the CAO told council that there is no current policy, though she said that she is working on developing one.
Given that a hiring policy is a policy that is mandated by Ontario’s Municipal Act, and so every municipality must have one, it would be strange indeed if Meaford had not had such a policy all these years.
Meaford does in fact have a hiring policy, we have had one for nearly 15 years; it was first implemented in 2010, and was updated in 2020. The policy, “B-00-Employment-April-20-2022” is section ‘B’ of the municipal Human Resources Policy Manual. While I have had the original 2010 policy in my files for more than a decade, since June of this year I have been attempting to obtain a copy of the most recent update from 2020. I had the original, I just wanted the most recent update in order to compare any differences so I could properly analyze some of the hires made by the newly minted CAO which certainly didn’t follow the original policy that I have had all of these years. My requests for a copy of the most recent update were denied, with an insistence that such a policy simply does not exist.
The CAO continued to deny the existence of the policy during Friday’s budget meeting, even posting a video on social media over the weekend purporting to have ‘discovered’ a 2021 draft version of a policy, while the actual policy file name is clearly visible on the CAO’s computer screen, but she didn’t open that file.
I was not able to obtain a copy of the 2020 update of ‘B-00-Employment-April-20-2022’ until Saturday, the day after council’s at times crazy eight-hour budget meeting on Friday. A former senior employee was kind enough to send it to me, and informed me that council could find their own copy of the policy on the thumb drive provided to them after the last election, which contained all of the municipal policies as a reference for the newly elected council. Once I had received a copy of the updated policy I forwarded it on to members of council along with instructions as to where they could find it in their own files.
But there’ll be more on my quest for the municipal hiring policy in my next editorial, of which I have a draft underway. But that story is not yet finished, so I don’t want to get too far down that rabbit hole just yet, though it is a story that must be told.
When asked by council for an organizational chart, the CAO said that she was unable to provide one, but would have one prepared for a future meeting. An organizational chart is a standard document in any municipal budget discussion, and it was strange indeed that one could not be provided to council upon request. In many draft budgets in previous years an organizational chart was a standard document that was part of the budget packages.
As you can see from this very brief update, this has been a budget season unlike any we have ever seen in this municipality. This is a draft budget that is a long way from becoming a final budget for council to approve. Councillors have their work cut out for them, and though council was expecting to vote on a final budget document on December 9, I think it is clear that there likely won’t be an approved budget until some time in the new year.
All budget-related documents are available on the municipal website (meaford.ca/budget), and the meetings are both live streamed on Youtube and archived there, so if you can’t watch the meetings live, you can watch them at your leisure.
Buckle up – we have a bumpy road ahead.
