The Municipality of Tweed held its second of at least three budget meetings in preparation for 2024 on Monday.
“The first one dealt with our capital expenditures, and this one looked at operational,” Mayor Don DeGenova tells Quinte News.
“We’ve also scheduled a meeting for November 21, I believe, to look at the combined budget so we can have a better takeaway of what are some of the things we’re going to keep in and what some of those things we might need to take out.”
The municipality was presented options on a $18 – $19 million budget with about 46% of it going to infrastructure projects in the area.
The municipality was shown two options on a municipal tax increase to help accommodate the proposed budgets.
One option showed a 36.21% total increase from 2023 taxation. This would mean someone with a property assessed at $100,000 would see a $255.50 estimated increase to their annual municipal tax bill.
The other option showed a bigger increase, a 41.2% increase. This would mean somebody with a property assessed at $100,000 would see a $291.46 estimated increase to their annual municipal tax bill.
DeGenova stressed that these were not final options and that cuts to lower the increase would take place.
“Last year, we had a tax increase of 7%. Well, we’re likely going to have something in that neighbourhood again this year and we’ll probably have something like that again, the following year,” DeGenova said.
“The reason being is the municipality is the lowest taxed in Hastings County. We have not been raising our taxes every year. So now we’re at a point where we have to play catch up and that’s going to be hard on our residents. But this is the price we’re going to have to pay for not having raised our taxes to the extent that we needed to raise them in the past.”
DeGenova says he hopes the provincial and federal governments will also help to provide funding to support infrastructure projects in the area.
“At the beginning of our presentation, our CAO had a slideshow and it showed that of all the taxes collected in the country, nine per cent is collected by municipality, 44% is collected by the province and something like 42% by the feds. But yet municipalities with nine per cent of the taxes have approximately 50% of the infrastructure costs of the country,” DeGenova explained.
“It shows you how unbalanced it is with so little tax dollars coming in but such huge infrastructure costs that we’re responsible for.”
A public meeting looking at the final budget for 2024 is scheduled to take place in January.
