Ray Wangen
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District of Squamish councillors continued to work their way through this difficult budget year last week - this time taking a hard look at the budgets for protective services, animal control, and by-law enforcement.
"The revenues from by-law enforcement and animal control are not much," said Chief Administrative Officer Kim Anema.
Council heard that while much effort and time is spent on enforcing the unsightly premises by-law, this rarely generates much money in fines for the district, since the cases rarely proceed through the court system. If a fine is ultimately levied and paid, it is usually around $1,000 - barely enough to cover the costs of enforcing the by-law.
As such, staff has suggested that the district pursue a by-law adjudication process. This would allow fines to be levied locally."It takes time to set this up," said Anema.
This year the district has included $5,500 in the budget for the adjudication process.
"This will be a positive thing down the road," said Mayor Ian Sutherland, who noted that it would allow Squamish to collect on more of the fines that it levies. Unfortunately the adjudication process will not be in place until later this year, and will have little impact on this year's budget.
As such council considered ways in which to cut from protective services, since increased revenue will not be immediately available.All councillors were in favour in principle of a motion that would see the protective services administration budget cut by $40,620 this year from the proposed budget of $86,260.
The remaining funds for administration would be spent on salaries ($2,150) building maintenance ($4,090) Equipment maintenance ($10,260), office supplies ($2,000), $13,780, and the methamphetamine program ($10,000).
However, the changes still have to go to a regular council meeting for an official vote and a few concerns remain."Before we agree on this budget officially, I'd like to see exactly how the money for the meth program is spent," said Coun. Corinne Lonsdale.
The changes in the protective services budget also include the elimination of funding for the Youth Corps under that area.
"I think we should transfer it over to a grant for aid application rather than have it here as a budget item," said Sutherland to unanimous consent.
While councillors seemed to be in consensus on the protective services administration budget, the specifics of the by-law enforcement budget, with council agreeing that they need more time to look at the numbers.
"Because this is not clear one way or the other we'll leave this to another meeting," said Sutherland.For animal control, council saw few ways to reduce their budget this year. Council did discuss increasing fines, but were unable to come to an agreement.
"We always hear stories about people not paying fines because they are either unable to or unwilling to, and that serve anyone," said Sutherland of why he has doubts about increasing animal control fines to a cost recovery rate.
Council also heard from Jim Lang, coordinator for the Emergency Services Program, which again council was hard pressed to cut."This is a lean mean budget," said Coun. Greg Gardner, who commended Lang for the value that the program delivers for relatively few dollars.
"If we're looking for more money, there's a hundreds of places I can think of where I could carve money out of this budget in order to give more to you so you could offer your volunteers even more training."
After protective services was dealt with, council discussed the grants in aid budget. Council agreed to bring all aid applications forward at the same time in order to best adjudicate how best to allocate the $110,000 budget.
However, council did hear from Martin Thorne, of the Squamish Farmer's Market, which has become an independent association as of this year. Thorne requested $5,000 in aid, and walked out of the room with a promise that council would grant $2,000 now, and consider the additional $3,000 at a future meeting.
"There are some time constraints here, so I would suggest we give the $2,000 now so the market can get things going, and then we can look at more down the road," said Sutherland
