Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Crowsnest Centre closes but my taxes didn't go down!

I received a comment today, somebody attacking me become the Centre closed but their Taxes did not go down.
Also they accused me of being hell bent on shutting everything down.

I will answer both of these issues:

First of all the Centre as only been closed for a short time, so obviously most of the costs to run the place would still be there until the consortium moved.
Then there were additional costs to relocate various groups.

Next you have never heard Dean Ward state that taxes will go down.
The costs of operating the municipality goes up every year, wages, utilities, fuel, maintenance etc, etc.
We have several options we can just raise taxes to generate enough income, we can shut down facilities and or services, or we can do a combination of both by becoming more efficient.
That is why the Cuff report states again and again that we have too much duplication of services and facilities.
Now I do not advocate for a second that we should go on a rampage and shut every thing down, but what we need to do his look at all of our facilities and services (kind of in line with Cuff's assessment) and determine if we can do things smarter.
Look at the example of the arena's we used to have two arena's with ice in them both, with 70 kids in minor hockey and 30 in figure skating each arena was running less than 30% of the time.
Now we have one arena with ice, running 60% of the time, and a second arena being utilized to develop other forms of recreation (Lacrosse, Indoor Soccer etc) and costs us a $100,000 a year less to run.
That's $100,000 less a year that the municipality as to come up with or the equivalent of a 1.7% tax increase.
Garbage cleanups we used to do two a year during my first term the cost got as high as $370,000 a year, we went to one cleanup and had our administration put more focus on the process and now we were down to a little over a $100,000 last year or the equivalent of a 4% increase in our taxes.
Nobody is talking about us shutting every thing down we talking about being smarter and even though taxes do not go down they should go up a lot less if we become more efficient.

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