Expect The Financial Plan To Increase Again!

This Council Has NO Idea Of How To Reduce Taxes!

The following is a transcript of the insight which came from city council at the electronic town hall meeting on March 25, 2013. I posed what I thought was a very easy to answer question given that this council has been diligently discussing and debating the $851,000,000 financial plan they adopted two months ago and have now seen for three months. Or have they??

Judging by the near complete silence that came from this council you can rest assured that the $851,000,000 financial plan they have adopted, if anything will increase in size.

It is unfortunate there are no more 'Loyd Sherrys' on council, who used to always refer to this time of year, as the time councilors had to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

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Question: I would just like to hear from each member of council what is one measure that you are personally considering as a means of possibly reducing the residential property taxes this year.

Mayor Ruttan: I don’t know if we want to get into it, do we have the time to get everyone involved, we’re running really quite a bit behind schedule, are there many questions left on the ah this thing. When everyone is trying to solicit everyone’s opinion it’s very very time consuming.

Mr. Cooper: We still do have quite a few questions remaining so, um, I’ll leave that up to either side.

Mayor Ruttan: OK well, does someone just want to take this question, or does staff want to have a go at it.

Mr. Kenning: I don’t think Mr. Taylor wants to hear from staff your worship. (chuckles)

Mr. Anderson: Thank you Mr. Chair, I’ll just answer quickly, one of the reasons why we did this e-town hall was to hear what the community wanted us to look at. And so after this, I’m sure all of us on council will sit down and have a conversation and see what possibilities there may or may not be.

Mr. Kipp: Yeah, currently with the budget it seems like we are into that process where we have already adopted it by motion. But I’m looking to the future what our pipe, our standards of engineering what they are going to be in the future, how they go along with global warming, start to look at the long term things, investing in our infrastructure, those type of issues, reductions of the buildings we are building now, putting forth ideas of how we can reduce the cost of our buildings, those type of things.