The City of Dauphin is well into the process of setting its 2024 financial plan, but it is still too early to say what that might look like in the end.
Mayor David Bosiak said there are many factors to consider. With major infrastructure projects such as the Main Street South reconstruction and the Buckwold Bridge rehabilitation underway and the lagoon expansion on tap, there are a lot of moving pieces to consider. Add to that continuously increasing costs, new union agreements and more upcoming negotiations, and it becomes quite a juggling act.
“When we talk about the overall process, we are looking for every possible opportunity to either reduce costs without reducing service,” Bosiak said.
On the positive, the City has an extremely good relationship with the new provincial government, having had several meetings with the premier and cabinet ministers with more coming up.
“There’s a window of opportunity there, possibly. We’re sort of reading the tea leaves about the positive relationship that the current provincial government has with the federal government and the, I would say, tremendously positive relationship that our municipal government has with our provincial government. The support we’ve received from our MLA and the premier himself and other ministers, I think, is all positive for us as a community.”
This budget provides an opportunity for the current council to begin putting its mark on the future of the community as its previous focus was more managing and completing initiatives put in place by the previous council.
“Now as a new council we have a three-year window to present our projects and have them included in budget discussions so that we can move on some of those that seem realistic or reasonable or fit with what we want to do as a municipality,” Bosiak said, adding just last week the City was advised by the province that it’s new Plan Dauphin was approved.
“So we will now, as a council, look very strategically at the items that the last council and our current council included in that, those things that were important to us as a community moving forward. And I would suspect that we will have some movement on some of those initiatives.”
Any movement, Bosiak stressed, will take place responsibly, with the benefit to the community weighed against the cost.
And while the news has been filled with reports of increases in the mill rates of other urban centres around the province, Bosiak said that will not necessarily be the case in Dauphin.
“One thing I will tell you is that this council has basically stated we will not hold taxes if that means a reduction in services to our residents,” Bosiak said. “We all appreciate that inflation is still running at over three per cent, that there are still some supply chain and other issues from post COVID still affecting supply and distribution of materials and other things. We’ve seen that in the projects that we’ve tendered in this last year, they’ve all come in higher than budgeted. So we understand that and as we go through this process we will certainly inform the public on where we’re at. But I can’t say that a tax increase is off the table and I can’t say right now how big it might be if there is one.”
Bosiak added Dauphin residents can rest assured that everyone involved in the budgetting process will do what is best for the community.
“We really trust our administration and I get the sense that administration really trusts our council and I doubt that we’ll be suggesting any kind of crazy projects that are going to significantly increase taxes,” he said. “We’re getting tremendously good advice from our administration on what is possible. We, like everyone else has, have challenges with costs and we’ll do the best we can to handle them. I trust the council and I trust the administration that they will do the right thing.”
