After councillor Tanu Tyszka-Evans presented the approved 2015 budget for the Athabasca Regional Waste Management Services Commission (ARWMSC) – complete with its increases – during last Tuesday’s town council meeting, many members of council were unimpressed.
“I know that when we do our budget, these requisitions are coming in from library, from water, from waste, from wherever; I’m going to tell people who are sitting in those societies or commissions or whatever we can’t be doing big increases with any of these,” stated councillor Timothy Verhaeghe.
“In fact, I want people to start clawing back on their budgets from last year, or at least toe the line. We’re going into some tough times here, because this is going to increase our budget by almost one per cent.”
According to councillor Nichole Adams, who is the town’s representative on the commission, the increase is mostly just a result of inflation.
With everything else going up, it only make sense, to her, that the ARWMSC budget would go up as well.
“I don’t like the fact that everything is increasing, but the fact is both on water and waste, we’ve had to deal with rising utilities and rising costs pretty much all around,” explained Adams.
“Everybody’s passing costs around. Construction’s more expensive, labor’s more expensive; everything you do, it rises every year.”
Verhaeghe mentioned that there was also a wage increase included in this latest budget.
“Council got a raise and the taxpayers of the town have to pay for that. How is that any different for the waste commission?” stated Tyszka-Evans.
“It’s very similar. Whenever you give somebody in the public sector a wage increase, the people are going to pay for it in one way or another.”
The council voted, in the end, to send a letter back to both the waste commission and the water commission – who also had an increase in this year’s budget – saying that their members didn’t have enough time to look over the budgets.
“It puts our representatives in a position that is precarious at best when you have — for example, with the waste — the other seven members that would vote in favor and the other two that would vote against, but I would like the opportunity,” said chief administrative officer Josh Pyrcz.
“I find it extremely difficult when the budgets are presented at the last minute, to be able to provide any advice or to look at in any way, the information being provided by these commissions or societies or whatever they are.”
Although council did not have the option of refusing the budget, during the town’s budget talks they will have to decide what they should do to absorb the increase.
Tyszka-Evans added, “During our budget deliberations, you will be approving the requisition we give you. If you do not approve that then, I believe, it will go back to regional waste and we would have to discuss how to set out if one of the partners is not approving (it).”
