It may be very early, and months before it becomes official, but even the mayor of Saanich finds the projected budget increase for 2025 hard to stomach in the middle of summer.
A report prepared for the next Saanich council meeting on Monday night suggests taxpayers could be on the hook for a 9.3 per cent property tax increase next year.
“It’s a big number. It’s not a palatable one,” said Dean Murdock. “And I think council will be asking staff to sharpen the pencil, come back with a number that’s going to be a little easier for us and for taxpayers to absorb.”
Council will get its first look at the 2025 budget Monday night. And while the early budget suggests a net increase of $16.3 million in operating costs over 2024, there’s not a lot of new spending or big-ticket items in the operations budget.
The increased costs are driven largely by inflation and payroll.
A staff report noted 2024’s $190-million operations budget included $12.8 million in additional spending, which translated into a 7.93 per cent tax increase.
The report noted 36 per cent of the increase was driven by inflationary cost increases for labour, materials and supplies for both maintenance and replacement of capital assets.
The trouble is the same conditions remain.
“The most significant cost driver for the annual budget continues to be labour related costs. Labour represents 62.53 per cent of the general operating budget. Labour will account for an estimated expenditure increase of around $8.44 million split between municipal and police employees,” the report said.
“When you look at the contributing costs, they’re well aligned with our priorities. You know, it’s replacing infrastructure, it’s putting money aside for facilities replacement. It’s an increase in public safety,” said Murdock. “It continues to advance road safety and active transportation and dedicated resources to planning and building so that we can get more homes built. The reality is the cost of doing all that is exceedingly high right now.”
Murdock said he expects council to start asking about ways to push off some work rather than trying to get everything done at once.
“We’re going to have to take a closer look at how aggressively we go at our asset management, our infrastructure replacement, even some of the work that we’re doing on improvements on our roadways,” he said. “These are all priorities for residents, but there’s also a limit to how much we can do at one time.”
Murdock noted they are putting money aside for facilities replacement, and they might need to be creative in how they finance that program.
“The reality is a lot of those places, like our rec centres and other facilities, are 50-plus years old and were built with a lot of federal and provincial funding flowing into the district. All of those things now either need replacement or substantial renovation, and that’s all landing squarely on the shoulders of taxpayers” and will mean working with senior levels of government to find some help.
The budget guidelines in the report include all departments facing a zero per cent budget increase in 2025, seeing a 1.5 per cent increase in property taxes due to funding the infrastructure replacement funding strategy and a 0.65 per cent rise in property taxes due to implementation of Saanich’s debt servicing strategy.
The budget contemplates a $4.2 million increase to the police budget in 2025, which translates into a tax increase of 3.4 per cent and an increase of $371,600 to the Greater Victoria Public Library budget, which adds 0.21 per cent to the tax increase.
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