The City of Windsor's seventh straight year of a 0% tax increase is coming at the expense of some "extremely difficult" decisions.
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens released the budget Monday saying $25.8-million in savings needed to be found to hold the line on taxes.
CAO Helga Reidel says front-line services haven't been cut in 2015, but there isn't much wiggle room in the budget either. "When you prepare a budget like this, there's no room for contingency and the unexpected," says Reidel. "If our winter is a rough winter, and so far we've been lucky, then we don't have any swing in our budgets to absorb those kind of unexpected things."
She says residents can't expect a tax freeze forever. "It really is a question of when council decides that we have cut or we are at the point where we're about to cut services in areas that they really aren't palatable or that council doesn't want to touch," says Reidel. "There are councillors with ideas who want to augment services, so that's really going to be the struggle."
Overall, Dilkens says there won't be any job losses, in fact, there's a net gain of 13.7 full-time city jobs in 2015. City departments saw a budget decrease of 2.2%. This year the city plans to spend $98.5-million on capital projects. The budget is being tabled at tonight's council meeting and will be deliberated on January 19.
