Perth County council continues whittling away at draft 2025 budget

Though they couldn’t come up with much in the way of cuts to the draft 2025 budget on their own, several Perth County councillors have asked staff to bring back at least $284,000 in potential line-item cuts to bring the proposed tax increase down from just over 11 per cent to 10 per cent.

At the March 6 Perth County council meeting, staff presented a report with answers to questions about the draft budget councillors asked at the last county council meeting or submitted to staff since then. The intent of the report was to identify further cuts to the budget to make the overall impact on county ratepayers more affordable.

“I feel that there are some areas that can be lowered; I’m not looking to kick things down the road,” Coun. Rhonda Ehgoetz said. “I’m looking to have our budget a little closer to some of the actuals. One of them I’ll pick on … it’s in planning. Our technical services doubled (from last year); it went from $22,000 to $44,000. Why? Does it have to be that high? Another one is in the clerk’s (budget); professional development went from $8,000 to $13,000. Why? Do we all have to go to the conferences? Do we have to have 10 of us there standing in front of the minister? I don’t think we do.

“Those are the kinds of things I’m more looking for to be closer to our actual (costs in 2023). … There’s nothing to say we are going to kick it down the road. If we are going to take it out of the budget, it doesn’t mean it’s going to automatically come back the following year. … As a business owner … I don’t have someone to hand off that I need an extra $10,000 next year. … I have to figure out how do that myself … to make that money. I find it far too easy here to come up with the figures and just hand it off to the taxpayer. Not everybody can afford this. There are an awful lot of people who cannot afford this repeat adding on and adding on and adding on.”

At the beginning of the budget discussion March 6, the draft budget had a proposed levy increase of 13.11 per cent which, inclusive of 1.77 per cent growth to the county taxbase last year, meant the proposed tax rate was 11.34 per cent. For the owner of an average MPAC-assessed home in the county with a 2016 value of $282,000, that would mean an increase by $103.32 to the county portion of their annual property tax bill.

Ehgoetz, who is also mayor of Perth East, argued the county tax-rate increase on top of lower-tier tax-rate increases is making life harder for property owners in the county. In Perth East, for example, where the average assessed home is valued at $321,000, the owner would see an increase in their lower-tier tax rate by 4.85 per cent or just over $69 for the year, while their county taxes would go up by nearly $118. With an education tax rate of about 16 per cent in Perth East, that property owner would see their tax bill increase by a total of just over $187.

In an effort to try and reduce the county’s part of that increase, Ehgoetz recommended several cuts of line items in the 2025 CAO budget including a new administrative assistant to the CAO at a cost of just over $52,000, a process review and efficiency projects at a cost of $20,000, the development of a communications strategy at a cost of $30,000 and another $30,000 for corporate communications.

Of her four suggestions, only the removal of the corporate-communications line item received support from the majority of council, resulting in a decrease to the proposed tax rate by 0.07 per cent, from 11.34 per cent to 11.27 per cent.

Coun. Bob Wilhelm also recommended the removal of $75,000 in facility audits from the 2025 capital budget, which council did support. However, because capital projects are funded through reserves, grants and funding sources outside of the tax levy, it did not impact the overall tax rate for 2025.

While Ehgoetz’s motion to have staff bring back a report outlining potential further cuts to the draft budget with the goal of getting the tax rat down to 10 per cent was ultimately successful, several councillors expressed frustration with the notion of whittling down that percentage to what might be perceived as a more-palatable number for residents.

“I think we have a habit of getting fixated on percentages all the time,” Coun. Walter McKenzie said. “Percentage is peanuts; look at the dollar value. … You’ve got to compare apples to apples, I think. We can certainly look at neighbouring municipalities, (one of which) has an increase of 3.63 per cent, which works out to $130.48 per household (this year). Another municipality was a 6.03 per-cent increase. It works out to $309 per household. At 11.3 per cent, it’s $103, so you’ve got to compare numbers. I think percentages is very misleading. You look at the dollar value and then make your decision from there.”

While Coun. Hugh McDermid said he’d like to see the tax rate reduced to 10 per cent for the sake of the taxpayers, he cautioned council around the dangers of kicking budget items down the road, and said council doesn’t want to become the next Wilmot Township, which began budget deliberations for this year at a whopping 51 per-cent levy increase to tackle an out-of-control, long-term infrastructure deficit.

“I believe in, fundamentally, an organization that fulfills its responsibilities and is effective and efficient,” Coun. Todd Kasenberg added. “Sometimes, those two ‘E’ words kind of conflict with each other because we can imagine a larger spend and a bigger scope of services. I think, fundamentally here, we have to remind ourselves that we’re a commissioned government that has responsibilities, many of which are set out by provincial regulation and statute. For us to be saying, ‘Oh, I want it to be 10 per cent,’ or, ‘I want it to be two per cent,’ this is … not a particularly valuable exercise. … Would it make a big difference just for the sake of finding a round number?

“To me, that’s not the point. The point is we must deliver a certain package of services, and some of them we don’t have to deliver. When you talk about $284,000 … you could easily take that out of economic development because it’s not a statutory service, but none of us have a strong desire to do that. We can look at little bits and pieces here and there, some of which are not relevant to even the levy impact because it’s from the capital side of the ledger. We can continue to lean and, in some cases, starve the statutory services, but I’m not in favour of that. … Setting some kind of target that is sort of picked out of the air because somebody likes 10 instead of 11 or 12 doesn’t make any sense to me.”

County CAO Lori Wolfe said staff will bring a report with potential cuts to the draft budget at county council’s next meeting on March 20. Wolfe also specified the report will include dollar values for each potential cut in addition to the percentage impact on the levy, and staff will indicate whether each potential cut would be permanent or if that line item would reappear in a future budget.