Council looking to trim department budgets

Posted Feb 2, 2012 By Richard Turtle

EMC News -Stirling - All the numbers won't be crunched for another month but Mayor Rodney Cooney says the upcoming municipal budget will be very close to last year's.

"That is going to happen," Cooney says of holding a tight rein on expenses. "We've told the managers and we know there are going to be some hard choices but that's going to happen."

A tax increase, Cooney says, is not an option. "We've got residents who pay four to six hundred dollars a month. That's too much." And paring back costs is the only alternative, he says.

"Right now we're over eight per cent," Cooney says of the increase shown by preliminary budget figures submitted by department heads. "We want it at zero," he says, which would then leave room for a small increase (one to one and a half per cent) to be put toward needed infrastructure projects including work on some of the municipality's 31 bridges.

"But I still believe there are efficiencies there," he says of wildly fluctuating department costs. "We've collected a lot of tax dollars over the years and I don't know where it's gone." Looking over figures of the past nine years, Cooney says, budgetary increases across departments range from about 60 per cent to 160 per cent. "We've got one department that's up 157 per cent (in nine years)." Those types of increases, he says, can't continue. "They're unsustainable," he says.

And with several fixed costs, Cooney admits, managers will have their work cut out for them.

Cooney says council is hopeful the numbers will be finalized by the end of March with a public meeting anticipated earlier in the month, possibly prior to a regular council meeting "while there's still time to tweak (the budget)."

"There are 4,900 people here," he says of the municipality, adding all have their own priorities, "but we have to think about needs instead of wants." And department heads, Cooney adds, will be expected to do the same. "It's not an endless pit," he says of municipally collected taxes.