Town Staff present proposed 2022 Operating budget to Council

By Rob Paul

With the 2022 budget for the Town of Caledon coming up, Caledon Council met with Town Staff for an overview of the operating budget and where things stand heading into December.

With the November 16 budget meeting focused on the proposed budget, the other key dates prior to finalizing the budget are an online budget Q&A until December 3 open to the public, a General Committee budget meeting set for December 7, and a final Council meeting on the budget on December 14.

In 2021, the approved projected Operating budget was $114.6 million, with Town staff proposing in the 2022 Operating budget a $3,317,826 increase to the base budget with the 2022 proposed budget at $120.8 million.

To bring in $120.8 million in revenue, there's projected to be $83.7 million in tax revenue (69.3 per cent), $16.9 million in user fees and rentals (14 per cent), $6.4 million in fines and penalties (5.3 per cent), $1 million in grants (0.8 per cent), and $12.8 million from other avenues (10.6 per cent).

The $120.8 million would be split across several different areas: $27.8 million going towards corporate accounts (23 per cent), $17.2 million towards community services (14.2 per cent), $17 million towards operations (14.1 per cent), $11.3 million towards fire (9.4 per cent), $9.5 million towards corporate services (7.9 per cent), $9.4 million towards the office of the CAO (7.7 per cent), $8.4 million towers engineering services (6.9 per cent), $6.6 million towards building and minimal law enforcement services (5.5 per cent), $5.2 million towards planning (4.3 per cent), $4.8 million towards Caledon Public Library (4 per cent), and $3.6 million towards finance (3 per cent).

With this being the second straight year Council must approve a budget while dealing with the fallout of the pandemic, it makes things slightly trickier. 

“The Town itself is recovering from the pandemic and how will that impact the practicality of actually implementing all the service growth that are departments initially set out to propose,” said Dan Labrecque, Caledon's Acting Chief Administrative Officer. “Taking a less active stance on enhancing our capacity and capability this year has the benefit of maintaining inflation level tax increases and respecting our own challenges as we exit from the pandemic.”

Throughout the budget process, the Town has been seeking feedback from the public to see what aspects they would like to see the budget prioritize, and staff have found many residents would be willing to pay more taxes to advance the municipality.

“Recently we used our new public engagement tool to reach out and survey residents,” said Labrecque. “At first blush, 200-plus residents may not appear significant, but it out-scales previous years contributions through other channels that we've used, so we need to listen. Throughout the survey, residents identified many areas that they were interested in seeing more service growth than in other years.

“One area of the survey that was interesting was in regard to taxes and user fees; historically most citizens in the province would rather see lower tax rates, but there seems to be a growing awareness in communities that municipal services are critical in the achievement of great qualities of life. To that point, 58 per cent of respondents would rather see increases in taxes or user fees to sustain or grow services as compared to 24 per cent that would rather see services reduced to hold taxes steady—18 per cent had no take on it.”

The presentation on the 2022 proposed budget by staff was to give Council an idea of how things will look as they work towards finalizing an Operating budget over the next month. Residents are still encouraged to provide their thoughts and feedback on the 2022 budget via the Have Your Say Caledon website that can be reached at haveyoursaycaledon.ca/caledon-budget-2022.