On Monday, Sackville town council will gather to ask questions and express concerns about the town 2021 budget. The public are also invited to ask questions during a 15 minute question period.
This isn’t the first town the public has been invited to participate in the budget process.
Back in September, before the town’s senior managers created this year’s budget, town council hosted a somewhat poorly advertised public session inviting residents and groups to weigh in on spending priorities and ideas for the 2021 budget.
Most of the people who spoke at the meeting were from groups who apply regularly for funding through the town’s grant programs. And if the presentations were any indication, the demands for community funding has gone up for 2021, with at least one new group requesting funding, and other looking to increase funding to meet their needs.
Sappyfest treasurer Jeff McKinnon indicated the festival needs more staff, and would be requesting more funding in 2021. Levee on the Lake organizers Shelley Chase and Stacey Read presented their newly minted non-profit organization, indicating they would be applying for funding this year under community grants.
Sackville Minor Hockey asked for a substantial increase in their funding in the form of lowering rates on rink rentals. Right now, the organization gets an $8,000 town grant each year, which helps cover about 10% of the over $80,000 they pay in rink rentals. In 2021, they are asking for rates to go down by one third.
And the Sackville Skating Club’s Jessica Steeves asked for ice rentals fees to go down by half, to help the club compete with more highly subsidized programs in Amherst.
Unfortunately, the town’s proposed budget includes just a 5% increase in grants to outside groups, going from $84,000 this year to $88,000 in 2021. It’s hard to see how the extra $4,000 could accommodate both increases in requests and new requests.
To top it off, Beal made clear that rink rental rates would not be going down. They would stay the same this year, and they could be going up in future years, he said.
Civic centre rinks users are not completely out of luck, however.
At their October 13th meeting, council approved a change to prime time hours at the civic centre, moving the early weekend morning hour of 6:30-7:30 from prime time pricing ($155 per hour), to the cheaper non prime time ($93 per hour), in an effort to make it more attractive for rentals.
Perhaps more significantly, the town’s proposed budget includes a relatively big bump in a category called Council Initiatives, which comes with specific suggestions for what those initiatives might be.
“We’ve allocated $65,000 that could be used, if council chooses, to give ice subsidies,” said treasurer Michael Beal. ‘That $65,000 could be used to do a skateboard park study. Those are the two items that we’ve earmarked for that potential $65,000 for council initiatives and priorities for 2021.”
The skate park study that Beal refers to is another item originating from September’s public budget presentations.
Resident Alex Thomas presented in support of improvements to Sackville’s skate park, a capital project that might cost in the neighbourhood of $500,000.
In their capital requests this year, the Parks and Recreation department did ask for $450,000 over the next three years dedicated to skate park improvements, presumably to provide the kind of makeover described by Thomas. But that capital request did not make the proposed list.
Beal says that when staff met as a management group, they recommended against allocating $150,000 of this year’s capital budget, but instead will, “look at doing that, potentially, a one-off big project in the next few years.”
The council initiatives funding would go towards a study, says Beal, that would help inform that project.
“I think the recommendation to managers is that we wouldn’t do any significant upgrades in 2021,” said Beal, “but we would look at undertaking the study to find out is it in the right place? Is it the right size? What is needed? Is it something like Amherst? Is it something like Moncton?”
“We can do the study and provide council with definitive numbers as to this is what is needed, this is how much money we are looking at, and is Council on board to make that kind of investment into the skateboard park?” said Beal.
The money for council initiatives will be officially allocated later by council, after staff present the options for council consideration.
Resident Wendy Alder was another of the presenters at this September’s public budget meeting, and her focus was on the Exit 506 area.
Alder called for beautification of the area, and further implementation of the existing plan for Exit 506 to be developed into a village-type neighbourhood, with “sidewalks, bicycle lanes, hiking and biking trails, [and] two new parks.”
Beal said that town management is not proposing a, “significant capital upgrade,” for exit 506 in 2021, and pointed out recent improvements funded by the town and the province’s designated highway funding.
But Beal suggested that the town would focus some minor beautification efforts on the exit 506 area in the coming year.
“We are recommending that money that’s allocated within our operational budget for flowerpots, bike racks… keep those purchases that happened for those in 2021, plus, some of the ones we have that just came in the fall of 2020, would be allocated to that area,” said Beal. “So that there would be beautification projects that take place out there as far as our operational budget goes.”
Beal says that the town may look at allocating capital spending in future years, “when we know more about what’s going on out there for potential project development on on one side of the street,” he said.
One area the town has decided to maintain and even bump funding, is in town-produced festivals. The annual May arts festival Bordertown holds its own at $12,500 in funding, though it remains to be seen if the state of the pandemic will mean the festival can go forward in the spring.
The much larger and more expensive Fall Fair gets a $10,000 boost in 2021, increasing the budget for the event from $65,000 to $75,000.
Beal says the 2021 edition will be the 20th anniversary event that was meant to happen this year, but was cancelled due to uncertainty around the pandemic. The idea is to create an even bigger and better Fall Fair, said Beal.
“We talked about what’s taking place with everybody,” said Beal. “The mental well being, the fact that we didn’t have the event this year, the fact that we look at potentially running this over a full week next year versus just one weekend… Hoping that by next September, we are out of COVID times, there’s potentially a vaccine, and that we are able to operate our Fall Fair.”
The town has posted budget documents online for council and public consideration.
Council meets on Monday on October 26th, for questions and concerns. The session includes a 15 minute public question period.
Beal is hoping the budget will be approved by council at its November 9 meeting, in time for the province’s November 15th deadline.
For more information check out CHMA’s other Sackville Budget 2021 coverage:
