Town of Athabasca councillors passed the 2016 budget in principle with a predicted $1.3 million surplus during last Tuesday’s meeting, significantly earlier than the 2015 budget’s release during April.
“We have passed a budget in principle, what that means is we have determined what we need to operate at our base level,” said town CAO Josh Pyrcz in a follow-up interview. “We have money left for council priorities should they wish to allocate that money.”
The relatively early passing of the budget — although there have been some budget deliberation meetings — wasn’t something that sat well with mayor Roger Morrill.
“I’m going to make that motion, right off the cuff, to adopt an interim budget (continuing the 2015 budget) and get some more numbers and we can sit down in February or whenever the numbers are finalized,” said Morrill during the meeting.
“I’m requesting it simply because there’s such an amount of money that still has not been expended based on the budgetary numbers. I’d like to see another month at least pass, (so,) we’ll have the closing numbers.”
Most of the other councillors disagreed and voted against the motion.
“I think we can approve it in principle for 2016 for the capital and the operating budget and then in the spring to look at us doing adjustments,” said Coun. Shelly Gurba.
“We have to realize the budget is a working document and that things can change drastically one way or another.”
Coun. Tanu Tyszka-Evans had some problems with passing the capital budget, stating that there “are a couple issues there that this council needs to do a roundtable on.”
“I do believe that we need to have a roundtable on, for example, the Wood Heights road, as well as the River Rats,” Pyrcz rebutted.
“However, I don’t think that tonight is the time to do that.”
That said, there was some discussion on the River Rats donation and including a cap seal for the road to Wood Heights — Coun. Joanne Peckham added the second to her original motion of passing the budget in its entirety.
“I find it interesting that this council has determined that their number one priority for infrastructure is a cape seal going up to Wood Heights,” Morrill said in response to the addition. “I’m not sure if we wouldn’t be advised to get some engineering advice on that. That’s a pretty major expenditure.”
In total, though, Morrill didn’t seem overly impressed with the budget. He believed that there were just too much being spent in a “cautious” year.
“I think this is the year (to have a) true fiscal conservative approach,” he said. “I think if everything is telling us to be cautious and from what I read in this budget, it’s not that cautious. From what I read in the capital budget, it’s certainly not that cautious.”
On the other hand, according to Pyrcz the town is constantly cutting back on its operations side of the budget.
“We did, again, reduce our operating spending,” he said. “The economy is what it is these days and it’s important that, as council asked us to do more with less, we listened and so we are.”
In the end, the budget passed with only Morrill, Tyszka-Evans and Coun. Tim Verhaeghe voting against it. The next step will be in February when the auditors come with a pre-audit.
“They’re going to start looking at the preliminary numbers that we have on the books,” said Prycz. “We’re going to start to refine our numbers based on that.”
“Then, when we come back to council in February, we’ll have a predicted surplus we’ll have priorities and recommendations and allocations formulas for them to discuss and we’ll move towards the eventual tax rate bylaw.”
