The following editorial appeared in the December 5 edition of the Guelph Tribune:
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, and it’s not over yet, but the way city budgeting is being handled these days deserves some credit.
The latest twist in the 2009 budget saga, which started way back in the spring with the presentation of staff’s first budget proposals to council, happened this week. Coun. Ian Findlay made a motion to have staff show council what a budget with a 3.75% tax hike would look like, and it passed unanimously – something that’s been rare in budget discussions of Guelph councils. It seems to mean that when this council sits down to pass the 2009 tax-supported operating and capital budgets on Dec. 15, they’ll be doing so with a tight focus and with a lot of valuable expert advice from staff in front of them.
Contrast this with the way budgets have sometimes been handled over the past dozen or so years. Back in the latter part of the 1990s, council delegated budget preparations to its finance committee – until one year when a newly elected finance committee came up with a harsh budget so unacceptable to council that council snatched the responsibility back for itself. Following years saw a mixed bag of budget approaches, but the part of the process that the Guelph public got to see generally seemed to happen in a rush. This approach reached a nasty climax one year under former mayor Kate Quarrie when arts and other community groups had to rally quickly to fight – successfully, as it turned out – a late proposal to eliminate all city grants to save money in that year’s budget.
The council elected just over two years ago decided to take a different approach, one that stretches the process over a longer period and involves more opportunities for public input along the way. Staff’s initial proposal for a 6.5% tax hike in 2009 didn’t sit well with the public, but council couldn’t identify any way to bring this number down during a May meeting. Then, at a meeting in late July, the budget process encountered choppy waters when Coun. Gloria Kovach – the Conservative candidate in what was supposed to be an early September federal byelection – traded insults with fellow councillors as her motion on city tax policies failed by a wide margin.
Since then, though, the budget process has gone relatively smoothly. In late October, city departments publicly presented their budgets to the council standing committees to which they report. Then this week, council as a whole met to be briefed on the state of the budget – and, as it turned out, to give more instruction to staff about where council members want to end up in terms of a 2009 tax hike at a time of economic crisis and looming worldwide recession. Now everyone can chew on this latest development until budget day on Dec. 15 – when, if all goes well, a 2009 budget could be approved with just about everyone rowing in the same direction.