It was a long third night for budget deliberations for Chatham-Kent council, during an online meeting held on Tuesday.
The proposed tax impact now sits with a 2.93 percent increase after four hours of motions and debates, just slightly lower than the 2.99 number that council began with at the beginning of the night.
With council running out of ideas to try and save money, they did consider a motion from North Kent Councillor Joe Faas to pass the budget in hour three with a 3.14 increase, but the motion failed with a tie vote.
Council will meet online for a fourth night of budget deliberations tonight.
Council tried to find creative ways to save money on night three, including taking a look at removing $300,000 out of the base budget, with the savings being found through service reviews, but that motion failed with a tie vote.
In a bid to try and save $500,000 council considered a motion to take money out of the strategic development reserve to reduce the tax increase, however that motion failed as well.
Chatham-Kent CFO Gord Quinton, used an analogy to say that taking money from reserves to help out the tax impact is like taking money from savings set aside to fix your roof and using it to pay utility bills or taking money saved up to buy a car to pay for gas. Councillors said although taking money out of reserves would result in a savings for this budget, it’s just passing a spending shortfall to other years.
Council did find $200,000 savings, taking money out of the market rate review, and council saved $26,000 by deciding to forgo their pay increases for this year.
Due to EMS service enhancements, council gave the green light to spend an additional $452,177, however council decided to revisit the decision later in the meeting, and decided to delay the service enhancement until July of this year, instead adding $163,000 to the 2022 budget.