Holiday is over...back to the budget

Well the Christmas break is over and council met for the first time Wednesday night for our first budget deliberations since Nov. 25. We started out with a proposed budget that was over 1.4 million than last years. In our first meeting we cut close to 300,000. Biggest cut being over 200,000 to finish a third ball diamond in the Hillcrest area. Main reason being as we have not yet determined the risk factor of Turtle falling again. No, we don't anticipate it falling anyday soon. The province has very sophisticated monitoring in place and have provided council with reports of the mountain's instability and probable slide run out zones. Our ball diamonds, as well as other private property, are in the potential slide area. The monitoring in place will give us weeks of advance warning unless a slide is triggered by an earthquake.

This past meeting we went over some small cost centres as our chief financial officer and public works superintendent were unable to attend. Still we were able to trim another 150,000 or so from some wish lists. We also agreed to increase development permits $2 from 4 to $6 per $1,000 worth of construction costs. The only real big cost centre we have to look at is Public Works. I doubt very much we will be able to cut a million from their budget so we could very well be looking at tax increases in this year's budget. Happy New Year!