As local governments on the Sunshine Coast get started on their 2017 budgets, the mayor of Sechelt and the chair of the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) are predicting bigger tax increases than residents have been used to in recent years.
Bruce Milne and Garry Nohr made the comments on Coast TV’s Talk to Your Local Government Nov. 3.
“There’s going to be some significant fiscal realignment coming into this budget in particular, which will carry forward in the future,” Milne said.
“I think we can see a shift coming from previous budgets where we’ve been pretty much holding the line because we weren’t sure how the organization was going to work out – we weren’t sure exactly what we had in the financial arena – so we were holding things pretty much at a zero base,” he said.
“The next budget coming through in the spring of 2017 is going to see a significant – in my view already I can say it’s going to be significant – increase in property taxes and I want to begin to start explaining that now.”
Milne said much of the budget pressure is coming from a need to deal with infrastructure.
“We’re certainly willing to listen to the community and if they don’t want to pay for infrastructure, or they don’t want to pay for facilities or services, we can adjust in that way,” he added. “But if we continue with the services we have now, and the infrastructure plans and the roads people are currently driving on, we are going to have to collect more money to pay for those.”
Nohr said the major issues facing SCRD directors as they get ready for their first pre-budget meeting in late December are in solid waste management, recreation, and fire departments.
“We had a report just recently that indicated we put $500,000 a year aside for asset management, to upgrade our recreation facilities. We reckon it’s going to be over a million a year to maintain them the way they are or to keep them up to par,” Nohr said.
“I said to another director that I’d be surprised if we kept it [the budget increase] under five per cent this year,” he remarked.
Gibsons Mayor Wayne Rowe wasn’t able take part in the monthly Cable 10 program. The Town’s director of finance Ian Poole told Coast Reporter afterwards that his department is still in the very preliminary stages of the budget process and they expect to make their first report to council in January.
