The problem with ignoring issues is that very seldom do they get better on their own without some form of intervention. Reasonable, sane, and well-adjusted folks are able to understand this when confronted with, say, an especially persistent rash, or a strange grinding in their car’s steering column. Usually they manage to attend to the issue before they need a skin graft or end up dangling from a cliff. Unfortunately, in the mire of municipal politics, this lesson isn’t so easily learned.

Previous decisions made by the current Peterborough City Council are beginning to creep back up, as predicted by Staff, delegates, and even select members of Council, as City Staff prepare for the drafting of the draft 2024 City Budget. Ongoing concerns from residents about the lack of affordable housing and social services, coupled with the ever present reality of an unpredictable and inadequate transit system and rapidly ballooning Police Services budgets foretell of a bumpy road for Council and Staff alike for the rest of this year, and presumably for years to come.    

A report that City Councillors received for information at a Council Meeting on May 23rd recommends that staff continue to prepare a Draft Budget which would see an all-inclusive tax increase of 4.8% for 2024. The report acknowledges that “there is a risk in committing to this increase” owing to many unknowns and Staff’s ongoing efforts to find efficiencies which might reduce the anticipated tax increase.

Alongside the update, the report is also meant to inform Council of the upcoming public meeting on the 2024 Budget, to be held on May 31st, and some preliminary results of a recent survey meant to provide insights into the priorities of the community. 

Among the top priorities that residents reported seeing as valuable for the city to invest in were affordable housing and social services followed by services such as sewers, water, and storm management and emergency services.

The survey also showed that nearly half of respondents (49.2%) favoured the implementation of new user fees for City services that don’t currently have fees, down slightly from 54% in 2022. Significantly, 40.4% reported that an increase to property taxes was in order to ensure that the City Budget is balanced, as required by law, which is up from 30% the previous year.

While the report and the survey results it contains are emphatically non-binding, they do provide insight into some of the possible directions Staff and Council could take when concerning the planning process for the 2024 Budget. A final version of the 2024 Budget Guideline report will be presented at a Finance Committee meeting on June 19th, 2023. 

The report also responds to specific actions taken during the 2023 budget planning process. The 2023 budget included a 3.15% increase which was down from a proposed 4.5% at the beginning of budget negotiations in December of 2022. Council was able to reduce the tax burden by implementing a freeze to transit funding. 

While saving the City approximately $1M, according to a recent report from Staff will come with drastic cuts to service including the elimination of Statutory Holiday Service, Community Bus Service on weekends and weekdays, and that only routes five and six operate on Sundays. 

The implementation of these cuts as outlined in the report, were deferred during a General Committee meeting on May 8th until the Transit Liaison Committee could meet and discuss the impact of these cuts. 

Despite the deferral, Acting Chief Administrative Officer and Commissioner of Corporate and Legislative Services, Richard Freymond warned Councillors that they were currently spending money that is not in the budget due to these cuts.

At that same General Committee meeting on May 8th, Mayor Jeff Leal said the report outlined a “stark reality” which would allow councillors to understand the parameters of what they would be dealing with moving forward. 

The reality of these cuts, however, were plain to staff prior to Council making their decision to freeze funding. As Arthur reported in January 2023, Transit Manager Laurie Stratton called the freeze “antithetical” to what the City should be working towards in terms of building the public’s confidence and ridership back up following the pandemic.

Another major point of the Staff Report concerns the implementation of the Police Services staffing plan for 2023 and requests that the Police Services Board review their five year staffing plan, which would see 49 hires over the next five years, and consider a deferral on the hiring of new staff positions in 2024 in order to lessen the burden on the 2024 budget. 

“The costs of annualizing the 2023 new staffing positions in the 2024 budget and funding the operating budget costs that were reserve funded in 2023 together have a significant impact on the 2024 All-inclusive rate,” Staff wrote of the impacts. Council nonetheless approved the Police Services staffing plan, which included 11 new hires over the course of 2023 with six of those being non-officer or civilian hires. 

The annualized costs of the 2023 hires are predicted to amount to just over $2M in addition to the Police Reserve, which had been used to cover $800,000 in operational costs in 2023. 

At the time of the passage of the Police Services Budget, former City Councillor and Police Service Board Member, Bob Hall, stated plainly that the budget as it stood was only delaying more substantial increases for later years.  

These issues will continue to come before Council in the coming months. If the past is any indication of the future, as Staff continue to move forward with the planning and implementation of the 2024 Budget Council will continue to urge for more delays on significant issues while cutting and freezing services. 

Despite these being increasingly unpopular actions based on the City’s own data, survey says it’ll keep happening until we’re metaphorically hanging onto a cliff’s edge. Whether it was the rash or the violent vibrations of our steering wheel, we might never know because no one with any say in the matter ever took the time to figure out why this keeps happening and fix it.