Lambton County's warden says the draft 2021 budget takes into account the hardships of the past year.
Kevin Marriott said the proposed 1.75 per cent tax increase is encouraging.
"That's mainly because we understand what everybody's went through in the last year, (and) we need to keep taxes down to a minimum," said Marriott. "It's pretty hard to go under the rate of inflation, I think 1.75 per cent is almost right on the inflation for the last few months."
He said, however, there won't be any pressure from him to get the increase down to zero per cent.
"Oh no. I'm thankful to be at that. If it wasn't for some of the help from the province for COVID, we wouldn't be at this level. Considering wages is one of our highest expenses and almost all of the wage negotiations are coming in at that or higher, we have to at least maintain what it's going to cost us extra in the next cycles."
Warden Marriott thinks it's great that new assessment growth is close to one per cent.
"I remember talking about it a few years ago, you know, how we can get new assessment up, attract new people to Sarnia-Lambton, because if we want to grow and build on what we have, we need assessment growth. It's so ironic that it came in a year that we've just been through with COVID that we actually have some of the best growth in a long time."
Lambton County budget deliberations are scheduled to begin March 3rd at 9 a.m.