Mayors of several East Kootenay municipalities say 2025 will be a difficult budget year for their local governments.
Sparwood Mayor David Wilks says inflation is forcing governments to pay more for everything, just as residents.
“The costs for municipalities just keep going up,” said Wilks.
“We have a wastewater treatment plant that was initially supposed to cost us just over $13 million. We have not even sent it out for proposals yet, and we’re told now that we can expect it to be $31 million. That’s a $14 million increase in four years. Where did that come from?”
Wilks says residents will have to be willing to make sacrifices in service levels if they want to keep tax increases lower.
“We can cut services, but the issue is that you go to the electorate and ask what you should cut and they don’t want to cut anything,” said Wilks.
“We try our best to keep tax increases as low we can, but inflation has been silly over the last few years and we have exponential cost increases on everything we do.”
Mayors of various East Kootenay communities spoke of their budgeting woes at the January 2025 RDEK board meeting and Cranbrook Mayor Wayne Price says the concerns are similar across many communities.
“It’s going to be very difficult to keep it under an eight or 10 per cent increase in a lot of communities. I think going forward, that’s going to be the norm,” said Price.
“If people don’t want to see eight to 10 per cent tax increases, we have to look at economic development or we’re going to have to look at cutting services.”
However, Price says ongoing budget cuts each year will eventually add up to worsening conditions.
“If you want to go from that eight to 10 per cent down to five, then we need to cut five per cent of our service budget every year and we were trying to do that this year,” said Price.
“But if this isn’t changing any time soon, where is our community going to be in five years? You can only cut so much before you start to see a significant impact.”
Price says he wants to help bring attention to the issue at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Conference.
“This isn’t just an issue in Cranbrook and the East Kootenay, this is happening across Canada,” said Price.
“Local governments need revenue coming from somewhere else. We appreciate that the federal and provincial governments are running worse deficits every year and they don’t have the money to give.”
Price feels the B.C. and Canadian governments need to tighten their budgeting to help local governments more.
“I think senior-level governments are going to have to prioritize their spending a little better,” said Price.
“There’s a lot of ‘nice-to-haves’ but local governments are not funding these any more. We’re funding critical projects only.”
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