Council approves 4.5 percent tax levy increase

Tim Brody - Editor

In a 4-3 recorded vote, Sioux Lookout Municipal Council has approved a 4.5 percent tax levy increase to support the 2024 Operating Budget.
Council made the decision during a special council meeting on June 10.
Mayor Doug Lawrance and Councillors Joe Cassidy, Joyce Timpson and Reece Van Breda voted in favour of passing the budget, while Councillors Luc Beaulne, Joan Cosco, and Cory Lago voted against. 
The total 2024 Operating Budget for the Municipality is $38,322,700.  The Municipality required $12,764,995 in taxation revenue to support the operating expenses, explained Municipal Treasurer Carly Collins.
At the previous budget meeting, Council had directed staff to find savings in line with a 4.5 percent tax levy increase.
In order to support the 4.5 percent taxation levy that Council requested, $80,000 from the 2022 Surplus will be used. 
Collins shared, “There is a risk with using the 2022 surplus, however Staff are hopeful that we can recoup those costs through an increase in taxation assessments from 2024, increases in user fees, and new revenue sources.”
In March, Council approved the 2024 One-Time and Capital Projects budget at $32,899.777. “These projects are being funded by a mix of taxation revenue, reserves funds, long-term debt, and Provincial and Federal grants,” Collins explained.
At the June 10 budget meeting, Councillor Joan Cosco said she would like to see the Municipality of Sioux Lookout adopt a new budget process.
She said that the City of Thunder Bay has budget direction meetings in September and she said she would like to see something similar in Sioux Lookout.
“I really think that we need to have some policies in place, philosophies and stuff, as part of our budget process. Not just this back and forth that hasn’t really, in my opinion, my point of view, did not play out the best that it could.” 
Councillor Joe Cassidy remarked, “I don’t like the fact that we are using the surplus to offset this.”
He added, “The other concern I have is that that contract that was signed so that the revenue was able to accessed, some of that money was from year’s past. So again, there’s an additional amount of funds that are going forward to supplement this year’s budget that we’re going to have to make up next year.”
Cassidy stated, “I think council needs to make a hard decision here. We’ve been through this. We have started this process. We started it last year, I think, in October-November, when staff met with us to explain to us the coming pressures of this budget. We’ve been well informed for over six months on this. To sit here and say it’s not good enough, it’s the reality that we live in, because if we’re going to sit here and borrow from our surpluses, but we want to ax everything to the cent under contracted services, well guess what, we’re not going to have any surpluses going forward.”
Collins shared at the meeting, “Staff feels that we’ve done a very good job trying to get us to the 4.5. We’ve done the best that we can to bring it as low as possible without affecting any sort of levels of service to the residents of Sioux Lookout.” 
In an interview with The Bulletin following the budget meeting, Sioux Lookout Mayor Doug Lawrance outlined some of the challenges councillors and staff faced grabbling with the 2024 Operating Budget. 
“The MPAC freeze has continued to challenge all municipalities across Ontario for several years now. So that’s one of the challenges. Other challenges are inflation across society, which includes the Municipality. All sectors feel the impact of inflation, whether that be insurance costs, wage costs, materials and supplies, everything goes up. In addition, the Province finds ways to heighten our challenge. We have quite a lot of properties that are provincially owned that either don’t pay taxes or pay a small fraction of what property tax would be in lieu of taxes. Also, this year they increased some of their tax exempt properties which decreased our budget a little bit.”
He stated, “I think a four and a half percent increase is probably, plus or minus, very similar to what tax rate increases other municipalities were facing. Some might be higher, some might be lower, I think we’re probably in the middle. Unfortunately, what comes out at tax time every year is that our residential taxes are higher than regional municipalities… The burden on our residential tax base is much higher because of the lack of industrial, commercial tax base.”
Lawrance thanked staff for all their work on this year’s budget.