Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 18/98) - The status quo is a go, again.

Despite council's ambitions last year of introducing innovative changes to the way the city does business, councillors on Tuesday approved a budget essentially the same as the previous five.

For the sixth year in a row, property taxes will remain unchanged. A small deficit of $60,000 is budgeted for the general operating fund, the account the city draws on to pay its operating expenses.

Also unchanged are user fees, which put more into city coffers than taxes.

Last year there was extensive debate on dropping one of those fees, the infrastructure levy. Council also spent a lot of time discussing lowering property taxes and restructuring water charges to encourage conservation.

Those discussions ended with a recognition that council, which had been elected less than two months prior, would stay the course for the 1998 budget, and work toward introducing the changes in 1999.

Though that did not happened during the budget debate, Coun. Robert Slaven said it might yet.

"With the levy and the water rate, administration has been doing a bunch of work to give us some information and options on that," said Slaven. "We're probably going to look at that in the new year."

The options, said Slaven, could include rolling the infrastructure levy, the $5 tacked on to every water bill each month, into a revised water payment scheme.

"I would agree that it definitely is a status quo budget," said Coun. Kevin O'Reilly, who was a lone voice in arguing preserving services should take a higher priority than holding the line on taxes.

O'Reilly said the budget process itself is one of the changes that needs to be considered.

"I think we have to have a better budgeting process in terms of council involvement in setting priorities, providing stronger direction to administration in terms of budget content."

Apart from a new way of calculating water rates, residents can also expect a new criteria for determining what grants are given out to the public.

During discussions of the grants, council asked administration to develop a policy for distributing grants.

Mayor Dave Lovell noted during debate that a policy had existed in the past, but was abandoned because it was never adhered to.