Tonight, Monday December 5th, Rothesay will unveil its draft 2017 capital and operating budget. Will there be any surprises? 

My guess is that the discretionary spending of the last council will finally catch up with us as the cost to operate those pet capitol projects hits the town’s operating budget. The new Council, if it’s is unable to reign in spending, will have to increase Rothesay’s property tax rate and while that means little to those who have plenty of cash left at the end of the month, it will add to the affordability gap for those who have had to give up extras to make scarce dollars cover the basics. 

As for Rothesay’s future direction, we’ll have to see what the new capital spending plans look like for any sign they are going to pull in their horns to allow Rothesay’s revenues to catch up with their spending.

Who will taxpayers blame if taxes do go up? Well in as much as any tax increase will be to pay for the past council’s decisions, you should look no further than Mayor Nancy Grant, Deputy Mayor Alexander, and Councillors Wells, McGuire, and Lewis,. They made decisions as members of the last council that we now have to start paying for. 

On Monday night we’ll also see if the Mayor’s promise of more transparency actually translates into a document that has enough detail to allow you to understand what Council is spending your tax dollars on and why. Last year’s budget was presented with virtually no spending rationale and so lacking in detail that it was impossible to follow the money.

Most municipal governments start their annual budget cycle with a public priorities-setting exercise. These typically include detailed reports from town administrators and members of the public informing councillors on the range of challenges and issues faced by the town and its citizens. You may recall that the City of Saint John had their priority-setting session a month or so ago and it fed into the City’s budget process, all open to the public.

A good example of where Council might improve accounting transparency is a budget item called “fiscal services”. All the various payments that Rothesay makes for all its capital borrowing for projects, like new buildings, or roads or hockey rinks, etc. are presented as a single total on one line in Rothesay’s public budget documents. That hides repayments made for each project in the total of the Town’s debt repayments. A cynic might believe that this allows councillors to dodge responsibility for justifying the cost of repaying  money borrowed for questionable purposes. Any way you look at it, this isn’t transparent governance.

Transparency also means having to explain when things don’t go according to plan. So before we get to next year’s budget, Council has some work arounds to do on the 2016 budget. The public briefing tonight should start with an explaination of where council got it right and wrong this year. The last set of town financial statements had a lot of red ink dripping out of them with little explaination, especially in the area of recreation spending. The Common rink operation, for example, has overspent the operating funds authorized by the last council by 43%. You might wonder, what this has to do with transparency? Well, budgets are a necessary control on spending and staying within them is fundamental to financial control and  accountability for the spending of public funds. If Councillors simply become bystanders while budgets are underfunded for political purposes and then over spent without any fallout, then they become part of the problem.  Out of control spending inevitably means higher tax bills. 

If you are wondering how we end up with these spending boondoggles, the answer is simple.  Looney ideas often start life in closed door meetings where the discipline of public scrutiny doesn’t act as a brake on free-spending politicians.

When Town Councils take priority-setting meetings public, then the end product will be a set of priorities that are better aligned to the real needs of the community. Vanity spending, without a business case, doesn’t generally survive effective vetting under the watchful eye of public oversight.

Unfortunately it appears that Rothesay had it’s priority-setting exercise behind closed doors this fall or it didn’t have one at all. Therefore I’m not confident that looney ideas aren’t still floating around (e.g A million dollar crosswalk/pedway for weekend joggers? or a New Arena and Field-house rebranded a wellness centre? or toilets in sewer lift stations?)

Not only was the Town’s priorities exercise apparently closed to the public, so too was a Council meeting tentatively scheduled for November 28th to review the town budget. That meeting is referenced in the Finance Committee minutes as a “Council Working Session. (Call it what you will. If Councillors were present to conduct council business then it was a council meeting)

If Council did meet to flesh out the budget and if these sessions did take place behind closed doors, then it doesn’t say much about this council’s commitment to transparency. There is a legal requirement that Council meetings are public with very few exceptions. Setting  priorities that involve committing public funds or framing a budget don’t fall within any exception to public meetings that I could find in the Municipalities Act.

So tonight’s meeting may be your only opportunity to understand what Council intends to spend your money on and maybe even why. It may also be your only opportunity to engage in or observe the budget process before a budget is adopted next week by Council. The meeting is tonight at the Town Hall at 7:00 pm.