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Council approves capital budget items

City council gave their approval for a number of major capital items to move ahead, allowing staff to make request-for-proposals from contractors, as they began the process for the 2018 budget.
City of Weyburn

City council gave their approval for a number of major capital items to move ahead, allowing staff to make request-for-proposals from contractors, as they began the process for the 2018 budget.
The draft budget was presented to council on Monday evening, with the initial increase to the municipal levy of 4.74 per cent. There will be further discussion by council members on some budget items to get that increase down if they can, and the budget will be back on the agenda at the Jan. 22 meeting.
The capital budget totals $20.63 million, which is an increase of 4.41 per cent from last year, and the operating budget currently is at $17.58 million, up by 0.33 per cent.
As city manager Roy Hardy explained, one of the major challenges the city has is a reduction in funding from the province of $1.2 million. To address this, he said, the administration has capped operating expenses, has reduced the city’s contributions to reserves from $500,000 to $100,000, and they prioritized capital projects.
Coun. Dick Michel said he’s not comfortable with passing an increase in taxes of 4.74 per cent, and asked if they could get the increase down to around 2.75 to 3 per cent. There was an extensive discussion by council on the procedure to do this, as council is using a new approach to budget-making by prioritizing their needs and projects, and letting staff do the line-by-line breakdown of budget items. The staff came up with a list of some items that council could reduce or eliminate, and in the end, council decided they need more time to consider these proposed budget items for reduction. The council did support enabling the major capital projects to go forward, so staff could start working on getting tenders out, and hopefully get the best prices for these projects.