'It's high': Yorkton council sets new budget in stone during Monday meeting

Yorkton City Hall is shown in this file photo

Yorkton, Sask. -

Yorkton’s city budget has been set in stone following the Monday council meeting.

The preliminary budget went untouched as council formalized the plans set out by Yorkton’s Finance Department. Council heard some of the concerns from residents, which were all tied to costs of the budget, according to city finance manager Ashley Stradeski.

He said the city is concerned about the same thing – a cost to taxpayers, which is one of the most important things they look at when doing their budget.

“Trying to keep that as low as possible and increases as low as possible, but rightly so, people are concerned. If taxes are going up three (to) four per cent, in that range, that costs everybody in the city,” he said Tuesday.

The budget will raise taxes to 3.93 per cent, $6.50 to $7 more per average property owner.

It will include an increase of 2.93 per cent to the operations budget and a one per cent increase to the capital budget.

Originally, Stradeski had a figure of eight per cent in a previous draft, but the city was able to cut that more than half, leading up to the tabling of the budget in late January.

“We took a holistic approach, and looked at other sources of revenue,” Stradeski said following the Jan. 31 meeting. “The biggest impact (was) straight up utilities … essentially, anything the city has to buy has gone up drastically.”

When asked to compare a budget without inflation to that of the 2023 variety, Stradeski said there’s always cost increases, but this year was different.

“Last year was a good example. Inflation was a little more under control … We did have huge policing cost increases, but if you take those out of the equation, our operating increase was around one or one and a half per cent. It's far more likely what we would see in say, a normal year where we try to contain costs as much as possible,” he said.

Comparing Yorkton’s budget to that of similar cities in Saskatchewan, Stradeski said the increase was lower than the average.

“The average is about 4.8 per cent, so we are about one per cent under the average. It's high because everyone is facing inflation, but we're happy that we're in the lower half of the cities,” he said.

Looking ahead to next year, Stradeski said the rising costs of projects is top of mind when he looks to tackle the future budget, including two major projects Yorkton is looking to undertake.

“We have York Road coming up, and that's one of the biggest projects we've ever undertaken. Some questions that people are asking is, ‘What about the hospital?’ Now, that is a provincial decision to be made,” he said.

“We know that the citizens of Yorkton will be asked to help out in that regard. The municipalities are responsible for a certain percentage of the hospital bills, so things like that are always on the horizon and are always top of mind.”

Last year, Yorkton saw an increase of 4.86 per cent, with increases of 2.36 per cent to RCMP related costs, 0.5 per cent to cover decreases in provincial Municipal Revenue Sharing and one per cent each for the operations and capital budgets.