Editor's Note. Mr. Rennick is responding to Council poised to vote on 2021 budget published Jan.22 in BayToday.
Dear Sir:
Does anyone wonder why we continue with this charade of electing a Mayor and council? What is the point of electing and supporting a group of people whose sole talent in a lot of cases is the ability to get elected?
We hire all this high priced help at City Hall who are presumed to be experts in their respective fields to provide the services citizens require. As with any organization, there is a need for direction, oversight, and management to ensure that citizens’ interests are being looked after. The sole reason that cities go through the exercise and subsequent expense of electing a mayor and council members is to ensure that citizens will have someone at City Hall looking after their interests. This is clearly the number one purpose of having a Mayor and council.
What we have instead is the Mayor and council actually banding together with City Hall staff on one side and taxpayers on the other. It is difficult to comprehend the total lack of support that citizens are receiving from the Mayor and council members regarding tax increases and taxation levels. This support from council is doubly important during this time when people have been furloughed and businesses are struggling to keep their operations afloat.
There doesn’t appear to be the slightest hint that the interests of taxpayers are being taken into account. Once again we have the Deputy-Mayor attempting to mitigate the tax levy increase by suggesting that real assessment growth lowers the tax levy. This is an absurd suggestion advanced by CFO Margaret Karpenko which is being parroted by Ms. Vrebosch and defended by the Mayor who has apparently appointed himself as the resident staff-support person.
The current budget will mean that the tax levy has increased by 15% during the past three years. By comparison inflation for the three years ending in 2020 has increased by 5.5%.
This highlights the fact that the Mayor and council have approved tax increases amounting to over 2.7 times that of inflation. If council had managed to limit tax increases to inflation during the last ten years, the current tax levy would be at $84 million instead of the $97 million that it is now. The tax levy per person of population has increased to $1,881 in 2021 from $1,329 in 2010 which is an increase of over 40%. Inflation has been less than half that amount during the same period.
Once again this year, the Deputy Mayor suggests that the City is trying to wean itself off of the Hydro loan proceeds. Loan proceeds are not income and pretending they are is a malicious deception. It is difficult to describe just how disastrous this costly plan orchestrated in 2016 by CFO Karpenko, CAO Knox and Mayor McDonald was and continues to be for taxpayers.
Interest to date on the loans made by Hydro has been over $3 million and the principal still owing is over $22 million. This expensive, stopgap measure was used to relieve council from actually cutting spending which is apparently a foreign concept among staff and council members.
Approval of this budget will also mean that the new arena project will be approved and add another $40 - $50 million in operating costs to the tax levy over the next 20 years not to mention the operating costs that accompany a plant of this size.
The Mayor and council members have clearly abandoned their mandate to protect the interests of citizens in any responsible fashion and continue to be misled by City staff. This is clearly to the detriment of taxpayers. Instead of having a group who will represent our financial interests, what taxpayers have is a Mayor content to post Covid-19 statistics on Facebook, arrange meetings, and spew feel-good bromides while attempting to create the illusion of actually doing something productive.
Don Rennick
North Bay
