Crowsnest Pass 2010 Mill Rate/Budget passes second Reading

Tuesday Night April 6th the Municipal Council passed the first two readings of the 2010 Mill rate bylaw. It should have gone to third reading but Mayor Irwin with the support of Councilors Mitchell and Taje refused to allow that vote to take place so it will come up again on April 20th for third reading.
The Budget which drives the mill rate was based on a maximum increase of 3% in revenue. Something that council laid out as an expectation of our administration right from the beginning of the budgeting process.
The municipality of Crowsnest Pass as seen its reserves dwindle over the last ten years from a level of $4 million to $600,000 by the end of this fiscal year. Why because we have done so much infrastructure work. The problem now is this year we are taking $500,000 plus out of reserves we can no longer do that. Well we could for one more year but then our reserves would be completely deleted we can not allow that we must build those reserves back up.
That leads to the process that council/administration have gone through for the last couple of months we have pushed administration very hard to cut every corner possible to produce a surplus that could go back into our municipal reserves and start rebuilding them.
Administration did that to a point they came back with a surplus of $215,000, where the area of contention arose was over what some of council considered was a further opportunity to reduce expenditures by addressing requests for new positions.
Which consisted of the following:
Additional Sewer Plant Operator cost of $94,614
Part time Position for the Human Resources Department $25,625
Linesman $85,500
Two Casual employees for Public Works $52,900
The status of these positions have been raised by council a number of times and of course administration did there best to justify the needs for such positions. The argument was made during the debate that the grasses in parks, the sweeping of streets would not occur. This of course is complete nonsense we are not laying anybody off, we are not eliminating any service.
The opportunity as been given to council to start rebuilding this municipalities finances we can choose on April 20th to do that or we can choice not to.

Crowsnest Pass, Budget process!

Just an update on the process, Administration will be providing us with a brief overview of the budget to night (Nov 10).
Then Council and Administration will be meeting on Nov 28 and Nov 29 to review the entire 2010 budget. Administration was given direction to bring back a budget with no more than a 3% increase in expenditures.