All Time High For North Bay Reserve Funds

Brian Rogers, city CFO, during his report to council at Monday night’s committee meeting, told members that North Bay’s reserve funds are at an all time high.

“It’s an excellent report tonight and I’m proud to see what we have done,” said Deputy Mayor, Peter Chirico.

With a 25% increase this year the budget chief told BayToday that the city is in adequate shape and moving forward he is pleased with the shape city reserves are taking.

“It’s a long term policy it’s not going to change overnight but it certainly is moving in the right direction.”

“Our goal is to get it into that 18 to 20 million dollar range although some people may criticise and say what’s the point of having reserves and tax rates are going up.”

Chirico pointed out that it is imperative that the city saves money to put in the reserves so that in the event of an emergency the city is prepared to meet it head on.

“What this does is insulates us somewhat from external shocks such as flood, bridge break downs, infrastructure breakdowns, weather you know all of these things that could potentially impact our operating budget during the year or a council budget during that period.”

He also said that in the long run this will save an impact on tax payers down the road if an unforeseen issue were to occur, and that it is one of the building blocks that allows for some flexibility in order to be able to spend the proper amount of money on the issues instead of cancelling other projects.

“Let’s spend money on infrastructure each and every year and rather than when there is an emergency cancel all of our spending and we just do the emergencies. This will allow us the ability to keep going.”

The only trepidation Chirico has is that council will fall to old habits.

“Mr Rogers also says the biggest threat to our ‘reserves policy’ is council’s possibility of dipping into reserves. And that will be one that I certainly hope that, not only this council and councils in the future, will take a good hard look before they pull any money out of the reserve fund unless it is an emergency.”