A little video on taxes and budgeting
I was honored to be asked to sit in with Sid Goyal, Candidate for City Councillor in Ward 5, to talk about taxes and budgeting. Sid recorded our conversation and put together this video, which he shared on his facebook campaign page: https://www.
Taxes are one of the top priorities of residents at the doors. Frustrations from the tax and spend ideology at City Hall may have reached the point of blinding the reality of Oshawa property taxes. Tax increases should not be inevitable and uncontrolled.
Yes, we face pressures from inflation and negotiated wage contracts. Yes, our infrastructure is aging and needs maintenance and replacements.
Yes, increased development and urban sprawl need new infrastructure. But we need to stop the constant assault on property owners to fund development related infrastructure costs. We need to take a serious hard look at current practices that waive Development Charge fees (DC), offer unprecedented tax abatements, and continue to push infrastructure maintenance and upgrades down the road for future generations. We need a new Council that understands the population. We need to understand and address the affordability pressures we are creating on ourselves and our families into the future.
We can't expect miraculous change without addressing the immediate needs. There are two important steps to turning Oshawa's affordability around: 1) We need to find efficiencies. I watched two reports to Council in the last term that suggested program and department efficiencies. Both of those reports were used by Staff to turn one year program efficiency gains into new salaried positions. That's not true efficiency.
It's smoke and mirrors to bolster perpetual staffing costs.
It's a work around of the budget process.
The Region is conducting a Core Services Review, long overdue, in an effort to find staffing efficiencies. Time will tell how that translates into true efficiency and tax control.
Should Oshawa conduct its own Core Service Review and seek out similar efficiencies?
2) We need to break the cycle of 'exception budgeting', where we start with last year's approved budget and add in factors like inflation, the effects of 'supply chain' increases, new projects, initiatives and staffing, but never seem to reduce any redundancies or previous spending.
We need to move towards zero based budgeting, where every department starts from zero and must rationalize every expenditure.
Former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was able to reduce the operating budget by 5% with zero based budgeting. Why can't Oshawa?
Oshawa historically registers annual surpluses of revenue and 'profit'. So why can't we just use more accurate budgeting to begin with?
Once the first two steps are implemented, a new Council can start addressing the real wants vs needs of Oshawa and its residents, and do so with a more accurate financial picture.
Decisions must be focused on outcomes, value for your hard earned tax dollars, rather than vanity projects promised during election campaigns and delivered only in election years.
How and where do you want your tax dollars spent? Reach out and tell me, please.
You can view the video here:
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