Huron East council approved a budget for this year at this week’s council meeting.
Mayor Bernie MacLellan says finalizing the budget took a little longer this year because they’ve gone to a new system. He says they used to area-rate a lot of items in the municipality. But they’ve change that and they no longer have area-rating.
“It’s kind of an odd adjustment for some of the areas this time around but the nice part is, let’s say next year, if we need a three per cent increase, then everybody’s taxes will go up the three per cent that is needed to raise the difference, so it’ll be even across the board,” he said.
MacLellan says because of the change, the final tax number jumped all over the place.
“A lot of places are actually a four to five per cent decrease in taxes and there are other areas that are either a ten or even up thirteen per cent increases in taxes. So it’s quite a shift in the way it works, so there is not just a single number that works for the whole municipality,” he added.
MacLellan says he understands that some people won’t be happy with the increase this year, but he points out the people that are seeing the big increase now were actually getting subsidized by the urban centres in the past. So that won’t be the case anymore.
MacLellan says they didn’t take any money out of reserves to balance the budget but the whole plan that they’re implementing this year is really a map that will take them to where they want to be five to ten years from now, so they have re-shifted how their reserves are working
