Bring in The Count

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The Count's reminding us of 8 long years in the history of the Town Ah, Ah Ah

Along with my analysis of wages and benefits from 2006 I promised a simple summary on the overall Town’s general levy since 2006. As I mentioned then, I used 2006 because of course this was the final year of that tax & spend mayor, Mayor McKenzie. The best and fairest way to analyse this is to use the StatsCan CPI indexes to adjust the for the net costs to be recovered through the general levy. Remember the Town has many sources of revenue from user fees at the pool to provincial grants, federal grants, planning charges, treasury charges and of interest on overdue property taxes. The difference between the various ‘other’ sources of revenue and amounts spent by the Municipality is what has to be raised through your taxes or the general tax levy.

Increases in fees and growth in the tax base (new buildings like the Deerhurst expansion) are one way to cover the increased year over year costs but why should costs be allowed to rise when there are minimal true costs of adding new properties. To me a measure of the quality of the council is the control of the general levy. User fees and the District levy (sewer and water, garbage, district roads, housing & social services) should cover the bulk of the costs associated with growth. The second ice surface should have minimal impact on those who don’t use the facility. That’s what user fees and rink board advertising are for.

Following the simple format I set out for wages and benefits (the beauty of cut & paste) here is the information on the general levy. Time to call in ‘The Count’.

In 2006 you and I were hit with a general levy of $7.820M with all other costs being offset by user fees, planning/permit fees, grants, reserves and interest. Applying CPI to this base number we should have had targets as follows;

2007 - $7,992K, 2008 - $8,175K, 2009 - $8,200K, 2010 - $8,347K and 2011 - $8,590K

Here’s the actual numbers. Once again, please watch out for lock-jaw!

2007 - $8,264K, 2008 - $9,031K, 2009 - $9,288K, 2010 - $9,751K and 2011 - $10,106K

For your entertainment pleasure, here are the annual differences.

2007 - $272K, 2008 - $856K, 2009 - $1,088K, 2010 - $1,404K and 2011 - $1,516

Don’t run for your calculator. The difference is $5,136,000 or an average of $1,027,000 per year over the five years the Town has been run by a shrewd businessman and his sidekick. As you can see from Monday’s analysis almost all the difference is made up of the cost of the increased salaries and wages and of course severance and the cost of those gags.

Model (Clerks Dept??) shows Council new and improved gags for severed staff

How about a wage freeze folks. All other levels of government have had two to three years of frozen wages with more to come. In 2006 we had one person on the sunshine list and this year we could have op to eight (annualized).

I don’t think I need to say anything more. Time to batten down the hatches.

Storm brewing on the Muskoka River, time to batten down the hatches