As many of you know, its about this time of year when the Town of Milton council sits down and decides how much money they need to pay for the services they provide. Its also a well known fact that Milton has one of the lower tax rates in the GTA, which is what makes Milton a choice for many people to live.
Last week on December 10th and 11th, the council sat down to hammer out the town staffs proposal for the budget. What came out of it was rather shocking.
After “long deliberations” the council had decided on a 6.6% increase in our taxes for 2008. This means a homeowner with a property value of $ 300,000 will have an increase on their bill of over $45 for residential and roughly $37 for rural.
Keep in mind the rate of inflation is hovering at 2.5% for this year.
Why such a huge increase? In the articles linked below by the Milton Canadian Champion you will see the highlights (or low-lights if you so chose) of the budget deliberations on the 10th and 11th.
The budget initially had an increase of 4 full time firefighters for the Milton Fire Department but Ward 2 Councillor Greg Nelson made a case for just one more saying “Four says we got the message — five says we care.” A little on the dramatic side and it worked as the changes were approved.
While I am an avid supporter of the fire department, I feel that we have to be prudent in our spending. Things cant change overnight or else taxes will be double digit before long. With this change it added $46,000 to the budget. On the down side, council took out some much needed funds for our new fire chief. While we will now have one more firefighter, the department will be without its new chief until June of next year.
Coupled with the Region increasing taxes by 3.7%, we will now see some big changes on our tax bills in the coming year.
As quoted in the Champion article by Melanie Hennessey “The $27 million in the capital budget will be invested in 96 new projects, including $3.7 million in the new Town Hall, $2.5 million in the new library branch, $2.3 million in a fourth fire station and $1.4 million in a railway underpass on Main Street.”
What was even more upsetting is the lack of interest from Miltonians about the budget and its process. The Town of Milton had a plan in place on a number of occasions for public input on the budget over the past year for what the money should be spent on. During these budget debates on council, there were very few delegations to speak out on it. We all complain about taxes but never really take part in the process that leads up to these decisions.
I personally am NOT against tax increases. I am however in favour of keeping any tax increase in line with the rate of inflation. We have to continue to live within our means With the town growing as it is, it will be hard for this and future councils to make those decisions to keep taxes and spending down. I am also upset at the amount of the increase which is a full 4 per cent over the annual rate of inflation.
At that meeting Councillor Wendy Schau from Ward 4 wanted to add another full 2 per cent onto the budget to put $400,000 towards the town reserves, making the tax increase 8.8%.
Other councillors such as Jan Mowbray and Cindy Lunau, both from Ward 3 supported the increase. Wendy Schau called the full 2% increase “good sense” while Cindy Lunau called it a “wise investment”
Since when does a huge increase in taxes make “good sense?”
Mayor Gord Krantz ran a very efficient meeting of council on the 17th and suggested to councillors that if they feel that these increases are justified or if they wanted further changes to be made, that he would propose to open up budget talks again and silence was his answer. Lots of talk.
This years budget debate brought out the usual “grandstanding” that’s become a norm at this time of year while each councillor stands up and tries to justify why we should pay more money. While some of these major projects are needed to help the town grow, these decisions could have been made at other times saving us untold amounts of money.
Bad decisions in the past breed bad decisions in the future. My only worry is that now we’ve had such a large increase in taxes this year, it will only justify council next year to raise them even higher.
There wont be an election in Milton until 2010 so we should brace ourselves for further increases to come until that time.
We shouldn’t be having any tax increases if full DC charges were in effect since 1999 when the building boom started. The region and local levels collect give huge discounts to developers–e.g., Brampton DC’s are in the neighborhood of $30 000. Milton’s were around $6 000 in 2 000 and were just raised to around $9 000. The tax base has increased substantially both regionally and locally. When Mississauga was in their building boom, there were no tax increases.