Central Huron Council approved its budget on March 28.
Mayor Jim Ginn says the increase was kept to 7.44 per cent.
“We ended up with 7.44 I believe is the number. I shouldn’t say we were taking money out of reserves because we were putting a considerable amount of money into reserves. So we reduced the amount that we’re going to put into reserves this year,” said Ginn.
Ginn says their biggest challenge for them this year is that construction-related inflation is running much higher than the general rate of inflation.
“It’s up close to 10 per cent. So it’s costing us ten per cent more to do things and we decided to do all of the projects that we had planned on doing because we know next year they’re going to be at least 5 per cent higher than what it would cost to do them this year,” added Ginn.
Ginn says he doesn’t expect the current challenges to go away anytime soon, so they’re going ahead with their projects and that resulted in the reduction in the amount of money going to reserves this year. He adds by the end of the year there will be $150,000 more in reserves than there is now, and one of the major projects they’re looking at this year is the re-construction of Isaac Street. The tax increase will amount to about $100 for the average house in the municipality.
