‘State’ speech: Mayor Josh Morgan pledges restraint in term’s final city budget

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Josh Morgan plans to use his relatively new “strong mayor” powers to rein in the property-tax hike Londoners will face in 2026, the final year of his term, he said in his State of the City address on Thursday.

Speaking to more than 1,200 business leaders and spectators at RBC Place convention centre Thursday morning, Morgan said he would use his enhanced authority – granted to mayors by Queen’s Park in 2023 – to order city staff to draw up options to keep the 2026 tax increase under five per cent following two years of significantly higher hikes.

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“What we have to recognize is we’ve got significant . . . pressure against the property tax rate,” Morgan told reporters after his speech. “Carving out a path to under five (per cent) is going to involve some tough decisions, and . . . I want to set the stage for having that discussion.”

The tax hike for 2026 is forecast at 6.4 per cent, suggesting potentially big spending cuts may loom. The increases in 2024 and 2025 were 8.7 per cent and 7.3 per cent, respectively. It was 3.1 per cent in 2023, this council’s first budget.

U.S. presidential politics may have also been mentioned for the first time ever by a London mayor in the State of the City address, now in its 46th year, when Morgan discussed his work as chair of a provincial group, the Big City Mayors caucus, to fight back against Donald Trump’s tariff threat. He said he’s concerned about the local toll.

“London is a highly integrated economy with our U.S. partners,” Morgan said, adding: “This is an area that is vulnerable to economic trade disputes.”

Morgan also referenced the London police – who received a record-setting four-year budget with his support 12 months ago, a decision that drew plenty of public criticism. The mayor said police plan a beefed-up presence downtown and in Old East Village – and will unveil a “public drug use strategy” soon.

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“We cannot allow for the blatant, open public drug use to continue in the way that it has,” he said. “It is disrupting too many businesses, it is stopping people from walking with their kids on the streets of our city . . . but it can end with a level of compassion for those who need the help.”

Morgan said London police Chief Thai Truong will unveil those details in the coming weeks.

Another raw nerve downtown is the commercial vacancy rate. Morgan announced a new measure to use existing city dollars as incentives to pay for start-up and renovation costs for vacant commercial spaces in “key areas” of London.

“I am very optimistic,” he said. “The day I can walk into a new business that was a beneficiary of that program that wasn’t there before . . . I’m going to be a pretty happy mayor.”

On homelessness, Morgan announced that the city would be partnering with St. Joseph’s hospital and Homes for Heroes to open a new supervised, 20-unit tiny home village on the grounds of the Parkwood Institute.

The units will be offered to homeless veterans, and offer counselling and life-skill programming. The city will use money from the federal housing accelerator fund to cover the cost with the hopes of opening this year.

jmoulton@postmedia.com

@JackAtLFPress

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