It's budget time again, and we already have one component of the local tax bill almost finalized.
Wellington County council made no changes to the budget as presented on Jan. 19, which included a 2.59 percent increase in the county tax levy.
That's the amount the county levies on municipalities to raise through their property tax bills. In Centre Wellington, more than half your total tax bill goes to cover the county levy, so any increase in the county levy has a much larger impact on local taxes than an increase in the township budget, which makes up less than a quarter of the bill.
Before the budget came up, near the end of the regular meeting last week, councillors had argued for more than half an hour over the pace of library funding, debating whether to push a further into the future renovations to the Puslinch library.
Perhaps unfortunately, by the time the budget discussion came around, councillors had been sitting almost six hours, the weather was deteriorating, and it had just been announced that Highway 6 north of Guelph had been closed by the OPP.
One councillor suggested postponing the budget discussion until the following month, given how many questions there could be - not wanting councillors to rush the debate just to get out of Guelph and home.
But when the warden pushed ahead, only three issues were quickly brought up. Two of them affected years ahead in the five year plan and not 2010, and the other was a request to roll money that may come from closing a transfer station into a reserve for garbage services.
The warden seemed a little surprised when her call for more questions was greeted by silence, and her call for the vote resulted in a quick approval.
We hope councillors didn't put aside legitimate questions and concerns just so they could get out of town before the weather deteriorated further. But if they did, we can't fault them - that's only human nature.
We hope county staff did review the budget as carefully as was stated, looking for any possible cost savings. And we hope that councillors in committee meetings reviewed each department as carefully as was suggested, trying to find any cuts that wouldn't impact services too much - or cause problems down the road.
It's been explained how pouring extra revenue into the year's spending skews things in the future, how zero percent increases can lead to higher increases in years to come, but if ever there was a year for restraint, it's this one. It looks like 2010 will be the year when the recession will be most felt by people and the community - and even the $53 "average" increase to the county portion of the tax bill may be too much for some people to bear.
But it won't be just that, of course.
Centre Wellington still has to finalize its budget. The township uses a similar style of corporate budgeting as the county, and will no doubt bring in a nominal increase of 2.5 percent or so. And then there's the school board portion.
We hope local politicians remember their earlier comments that the economy and the effects of the recession on residents were on their minds; that tax increases would be "unacceptable" this year.
Perhaps we're being facetious, but 2.5 percent, however small, is still an increase; and there are many families in the area whose incomes not only didn't increase by that much, but which decreased - and drastically.