Budget Delibrations Continue In the Crowsnest Pass

Well here we are continuing down the path of trying to get a budget in the Crowsnest Pass. As we go through the old process of drag it out, stall and wait until the last possible moment to come up with the tax rate for the next year.
Monday night we did make a little progress we eliminated one of our cleanups, a request from the Chamber of Commerce for $25,000, a request to spend an extra $27,000 grooming trails, and will bring in $3,000 to remove deep freezes.
That leaves a gap of $156,461 to get down to 5% which is still high when you compare to other municipalities check the list on the left side of this blog. To pay that amount the increase would have to go to 7.5% and zero dollars would be placed into reserves. Some will argue that dollars should not go into reserves during difficult economical times, take a look on the Municipal Web site you will see that we have been depleting reserves for the last six years.
The problem we have, is we has councilors must be prepared to make difficult choices to get down to reasonable tax increase.
Councilors need to do one of several things, come to budget meetings prepared with ideas on how to decrease the budget shortfall, be willing to look at reducing services/programs/expenditures, or be prepared to go with a 7.5% tax Increase.
It gets so tiring listening to "I'm not prepared to look at that", "we can't cut that", well bring your idea's lets debate them, I have no problem going with better ideas than mine.

Or maybe the good taxpayers of the Crowsnest Pass can live with a 7.5% increase this year!

Did anybody Notice?

Posted on CBC is a Summary Statement of Transactions

From 2007 to 2014 the federal government will pay (Should I say Taxpayers) $242.8 billion in finance charges ($7141 per Canadian) on the Public Debt which will be standing at $541.8 billion by 2014. That works out to $15,935 (34,000,000 Canadians) for every Man Women and Child in this country.