PAPS Chief Patrick Nogier. (Nigel Maxwell/paNOW)

By Susan McNeil

2024 budget discussions

Council cuts police budget ask in effort to reduce looming tax hike

Nov 17, 2023 | 6:00 PM

With a potential 14.5 per cent tax increase coming, Prince Albert city council did not give the police service its requested increase of $1.5 million over last year’s budget of $18.3 million dollars.

Instead, council passed a motion to give them a $750,000 increase, which means the service will now look at ways of changing what it had planned for next year, said Chief Patrick Nogier.

“It has a significant impact on how we’re going to respond. It forces us to go back now and re-evaluate exactly where those areas that we had asked for those increases, where we’re going to be able – if at all – be flexible and have to pivot.”

Nogier said during his presentation to council that much of the change that the service needs to make is internal and no new officers are needed.

Instead, he has focused his first six months on changes such as diverting certain calls for a phone response rather than an in-person response.

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That move alone has freed up officers to spend more time on calls that involve a lot of human trauma.

“We need to determine when we do deploy resources, we’re getting the best return on our investment,” he said.

In Saskatoon, the amount of time and money spent lodging people in cells for intoxication is staggering, Nogier said. Prince Albert police also deal with a large number of people who just need to sober up, something that may not necessarily need to be done in cells.

He also plans to pressure the province to relax the strict role of the traffic officers that the province pays for.

A recurring theme in councillor comments on Friday, the second day of 2024 budget deliberations was that the provincial government needs to do more, as council struggles to find ways to reduce the amount of budget and what would otherwise be a whopping 14.5 per cent tax increase, just to keep services at their current level.

While going over the public works budget in the morning, councillors asked about snow removal, which was a hot topic in the last two years after winter started with large snowfalls.

That budget was left static at $1.6 million, despite a much slower start to the winter in 2023.

“Anything in excess of what we budget in a calendar year goes to pay down the deficit,” said acting Public Works manager Jeff Da Silva.

Last year saw a large increase to snow removal after underbudgeting for several years led to accounting issues.

Mayor Greg Dionne asked when SaskPower will start to pass on the savings of switching all the street lights to LED several years ago.

The annual bill was to remain static for several years but council was told that after that, they would see a reduction in their power bill.

Council opted to have the mayor send a strongly worded letter to the provincial minister in charge of Crown Corps.

Some discussion was also had on the city transit system and trying to return to the more modern buses that ‘kneel’ – or drop – to be more accessible to people in wheel chairs or with reduced mobility in general.

The topic of the city’s lawsuit against Vicinity Motors and Grand West Transport, the company that sold them defective buses several years ago.

Dionne said the next hearing on the civil suit will be in January where he is scheduled to testify.

He called the lawsuit a ‘no-brainer’ and said the money that comes back to the city will help upgrade the current fleet.

Budget discussions resume on Saturday.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com