Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 17/99) - Expect to see some widely divergent opinions among councillors during debate of the city's 2000 budget.

Council will be faced with some tough decisions, most of them involving tradeoffs between taxes and services or capital projects.

Some, like Coun. Robert Slaven, will be looking to bring taxes down to where they were before the summer property tax increase of 3.7 per cent.

"I want to propose cuts and changes that will reduce that (increase)," said Slaven. He said the changes would be aimed at bringing expenses into line with revenues minus the city's portion of the $738,000 in property taxes Giant paid before its owner went bankrupt.

But Slaven said once the public becomes more aware of the cuts that will be necessary to achieve the rollback, public perception about the increase might change.

"I figure, propose (the rollback) and go ahead, but be open to change, if that's what people want," said Slaven. "I think we might be able to do it without too much difficulty, but we'll see how it goes."

Coun. Ben McDonald said cutting taxes is not his first priority.

"It's more important, to me, to protect the quality of public services the city provides," he said.

Coun. Blake Lyons said he will be looking to get rid of the increase.

"I would like to address that because we had a fair representation at the time (the tax increase was debated by council)," said Lyons. "They're good citizens of Yellowknife and they don't get aroused easily. When they do it's a sign there's something wrong and we better fix it. I think we have to look at curbing taxes."

Mayor Dave Lovell said his approach to the budget was to "balance ideology with practicality."

Lovell said there won't be a whole lot of room to manoeuvre.

"Looking at it practically, there's very little discretionary money in the budget," said the mayor.

"We're not going to close an arena, we're not going to close the swimming pool ... We have to pump the water, we've got to heat the water, pay for our fuel and electricity."

Lovell said the impact of each budget is not felt until three or more years later. The challenge, he said, is to balance short-term demands with long-term requirements.

"It would be very, very easy to look good," said Lovell.

"You could cut expenses and reconstruction and it would take a long time for it to catch up to you. But when it did there would be quite an impact."