By Andrew de Souza

Fund request shows city’s new budget pressures

Jan 5, 2011 | 7:23 AM

The difficulties of the city’s new sped-up budget timeline were brought to light at Monday’s executive committee meeting.

The city received a request from the North Central Saskatchewan Waste Management Corporation to increase its per capita funding to $4.50 up from $4, for a total of an addition $15,000 from the city.

The committee approved the recommendation, but it brought to light complications created when the city voted to change its budget deadlines to the beginning of the each year instead of the middle.

Councillor Martin Ring said it was a situation that would probably repeat itself.

“I’m afraid that this exact situation is going to come up time and time and time again,” said Ring.

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“We’ve got a lot of our organizations (and) some of them have started their budget processes as well, we’ve pushed ours up, but we’re guessing.”

He said he was most concerned because the city was basing its budget on funds expected to come from the government with no guarantee that it would happen.

“We’re guess that the provincial government is going to give us (a certain) number of dollars in funding — that hasn’t been confirmed yet,” Ring said. “What happens if they come back to us a month and a half, two months into our budget process and say oh, by the way, we’ve got a cut back.”

“It’s not like we can send a bill to the provincial government and say ‘pony up.’”

Councillor Greg Dionne said both issues were understandable and had been recognized by council.

“The earlier we do our budget, we’re at risk,” he said. “That’s one of the things that were discussed when we decided to move our budget ahead. But there (were) more pros to moving our budget ahead that there (were) cons.”

See Related:
Nov 25 – City budget to be more transparent

adesouza@panow.com