By Emily Keller

2020 budget deliberations

More cuts made at Thursday’s Budget deliberations

Nov 14, 2019 | 8:19 PM

Day two of the 2020 budget deliberations went Thursday with further reductions.

Wednesday saw the reduction of items city management recommended as having the least impact on services, while day two saw the moderate to most impactful potential reductions, those not endorsed by management.

Councilor Dylan Bressey says he is proud of the work administration and council has done so far, and that he thinks they will be able to absorb the costs without hurting the community.

“I think it’s a challenging budget for us because we have to absorb about four-and-a-half million dollars worth of decisions by federal and provincial governments. That’s equivalent to about a four percent property tax increase, which isn’t acceptable to this community and isn’t acceptable to council.”

City management was provided with a target tax change of plus or minus 1.5% and had put together a series of strategies to reach that goal.

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An option to reduce the amount of municipally funded members of the ALERT team for northwestern Alberta had significant discussion surrounding it, with the impact on the budget if kept in being $480,000.

The ALERT team for the region currently has 14 members, with five being municipally funded. The reduction would create a loss of three of the five.

Councilor Bressey made a motion to have those funds not cut from the budget, but instead reallocated to the Grande Prairie RCMP detachment, meaning ALERT would still see a loss of three members, while the Grande Prairie RCMP would see a gain of three.

He says they are seeing their RCMP costs go up by over $2 million next year.

“Just for what the RCMP was already doing not, for any additional officers. At the same time, we’re seeing the province take money from the city and other municipalities for justice initiatives, which is well within it’s prerogative, I’m actually glad to see it doing that, but, as the province is collecting that money for provincial initiatives, we need to take a good look at how we’re supporting regional initiatives.”

Councilor Bressey’s motion was passed.

Council chose to cut $55,000 from Revolution Place, which would remove a box office position, noting a large amount of usage of the online ticket system instead of the box office.

A reduction in the amount of money saved for neighborhood associations also went through, with matching grants seeing a decrease of $20,000.

A reduction of $50,000 in funding towards equipment at the Eastlink Centre also went through.

Budget deliberations continue Friday morning at city hall.