The Town of Black Diamond stuck to its promise to not exceed last year’s operating costs by more than one per cent when it hit the books this year. Town council approved an operating budget of $3,267,975 this month, an almost one per cent increase over last year. Council also reduced the homeowner portion by one per cent to 88 per cent and increased the commercial portion to 12 per cent. These changes means an average house worth $348,000 will see a decrease in their municipal taxes of $124.23 this year. With the provincial requisitions, the decrease will drop to an average of $79.55. In addition, commercial properties worth $224,000 will see an average increase of $162 this year. “The impact on business has gone up slightly because council is looking at increasing the gap between residential and commercial,” said Sharlene Brown, chief administrative officer. “To be a viable community the recommendation is to be at an 80 per cent residential and 20 per cent commercial. We realize that we will probably never hit the target of the 80/20 split because if you’re going to focus on economic development opportunities you want to keep that tax rate lower.” To maintain a small increase, Brown said administration worked to reduce spending in services. “Instead of having three days of street cleaning there is only one and a half days,” she said. “We also reduced the amount that was transferred into reserves, reducing capital spending for future projects. If we don’t have much money going into operational reserves we don’t have as much to pull from.” Brown said administration worked to make very little public impact. “We had to determine where could we still deal with levels of service and what we need to do to decrease the levels of service to be able to accommodate less than one per cent that wouldn’t really impact community,” she said. “Working within a one per cent increase for operations when the cost of everything is going up is challenging.” Mayor Ruth Goodwin said it was due to the hard work of administration that the Town was able to achieve such a small increase in its operating budget this year. “I would really like to thank the staff and our CAO for being able to accommodate council’s request to ensure that our budget not exceed a one per cent increase,” she said. “Without their hard work and diligence it would have been a much harder process to go through.” To achieve the small increase, the Town had to do some trimming, said Goodwin. She, too, hopes it has little impact on the public. “We’re going to see how it affects the service and we’ll determine in the following year the impact of our decisions and the quality of the service and we’re also going to be very aware of our operating reserves for the following year,” she said. Goodwin said, ideally, she would have liked to see more money put into reserves for future capital projects and unexpected expenses the Town may face. “We need to arrest that practice and change how we do things,” she said. “That is something that council as a whole needs to agree to. This is our first year as a new council and we just need to be little bit more innovative.” With the announcement earlier this year that Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) funding will be cut, which covers a large portion of capital costs, Goodwin said the future of grant funding is unclear for the Town. “They’re going to replace it with another practice but we do not know the amount of the new grant funding to municipalities,” she said. “It’s a wait and see. We’re in the same boat as other Alberta municipalities.”
