UPDATED 11/15/09 - COMMENTS RECEIVED - We have reprinted in toto the speech made by Abbotsford Ratepayers Association (ARA) president Vince Dimanno at Thursday night’s budget consultation meeting on the City’s operations budget. The speech can also be viewed in the video box on the home page.

2009 - 2010 Abbotsford Ratepayers Association Budget Presentation

Mr. Mayor, thank you for the opportunity to present our thoughts and ideas on the upcoming City of Abbotsford Budget.

This year the Abbotsford Ratepayers Association is going to adopt a slightly different format to our presentation.

Last year we came prepared with a list of ideas on where and how the City could adjust its thinking and its budget to mitigate Property Tax and Fee increases. However, those comments were developed before any opportunity to review the City’s proposed Budget.

This year we will break our appearances before you into two separate components. Tonight I will speak to you about the Budget consultation process and wider issues around City policies in the creation of the Budget.  At the next session, we will present specific Budget item recommendations based on the information you have/will provide this evening.

My final introductory comment is this; the ARA hopes Council and City Staff understand that it is our intention to offer both criticism and solutions. Mr. Mayor, you have classified this period in Abbotsford’s history as one of its most financially challenging. Therefore, we are going to be very hard on you for the choices you make. We’ll balance that with solutions and the combination of the two is hoped to inspire in you not only a different set of choices, but also more self-analysis.

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The Budget Consultation process is inherently flawed.

The City of Abbotsford asks for feedback and input on the Budget process and yet provides us with virtually no information at all on which to base our comments. Since, once again, we have no idea what you will/have present/ed to us tonight, let’s look back at last year.

During multiple presentations on the 2009 Budget, only one single chart displayed any kind of breakdown of the General funding description. For example, there was no breakdown of General capital expenditures into Parks & Rec, Engineering and so forth. The one chart that did show any breakdown was a 3 year average. Not exactly full of detailed information from which we can give you detailed input.

Frankly, this is not acceptable. The taxpayers and voters are your CEO. While you may have been elected, that is not unconditional acceptance of anything you might care to do. No CEO operates a business without monitoring his Vice Presidents.

Perhaps you think we won’t understand a detailed Budget document? The ARA is made up of a Board that includes a Senior Financial Advisor, an Economist, an Accountant who previously audited Municipal books, and many business owners. If my accountant presented me with the information you present to taxpayers as my business’ upcoming budget, he wouldn’t be working for me for very long.

Why is this so important?

Well, in last year’s budget there were detailed numbers that deeply troubled the ARA. Chief among them were your choices of what capital projects to defer.

Of the close to $50 million in deferred capital projects more than $32 million were road construction or maintenance projects. This basic infrastructure was set aside, and now the City of Abbotsford hopes to make up for it by imposing a Gas Tax. I’m going to talk more about that later, but there was something glaringly missing from the list of deferrals…

…not one single penny of Parks & Recreation spending was deferred…not one.

Now, I’m not talking about Plan A. Interestingly enough, not one slide of any presentation last year dealt with anything to do with Plan A in any meaningful way…I guess someone forgot to include Operating expenses, capital cost overruns, etc…perhaps this year will be different.

No, what I’m talking about is that the City of Abbotsford chose to fulfill every single line item of Parks & Rec capital and operating budgets while our roadways degraded into the worst in the Province.

It is our opinion you are purposely deferring roadwork and spending the money in other areas like Parks & Recreation in order to justify your Gas Tax application. When you look at the fact you have chosen a new digital sign at ARC over road repairs, or flat screen monitors to display admission pricing over road line painting, or water park upgrades over water delivery, our opinion is very valid indeed.

As you all know, the ARA has written to the Province of British Columbia requesting that they deny any application from Abbotsford for a Gas Tax. It is our feeling that once you have permission to tax gas directly, you will use this as a means of bailing yourselves out of every bad financial decision you have ever made and will ever make. 2 cents per litre will be come 20 cents per litre seemingly overnight.

I’m here to tell you that in our opinion, the City of Abbotsford needs to plan now for the eventuality that they will not get that permission from the Province. Working against you is the precedent it will set. Once permission is given to Abbotsford, then the Province will have to give it to everyone and the decision to levy the tax will be blamed on the Province and not this Council. As neophyte a politician as I am, the Province is not going to take the heat for something they won’t get a penny from.

We stood here last year and advised you that the Parks & Rec budget must be cut and drastically so. In a recession, Parks & Rec must be considered a luxury expenditure. Roads and infrastructure are not. The Parks & Rec budget makes up more than 40% of our capital expenditures and almost 20% of our operating expenses and this must end.

Mr. Mayor, you have asked what the citizens of Abbotsford would like to give up in terms of City services and facilities. You offered the ultimatum of a Gas Tax or a huge Property Tax increase. While we have a long list of things we are willing to give up, I can tell you briefly that the people of Abbotsford choose safe roads. We don’t need a single new park. In those 7 words alone I have given you the ability to remove, according to City Manager Frank Pizzuto, $2.2 million from your Capital Budget. That is almost half of what you hope to generate in a gas tax for this year alone and sir, we have only just begun to tell you what we can live without.

Last year, we also spoke to you about discontinuing the Social Planning Committee. This was simply ignored and yet when you give a thoughtful group like the ARA only a couple of minutes to speak and then are not bothered to follow up with us, Council misses out on some truly inspired ideas. In this case, we are lock step in agreement with the Chair of that committee that the Province and Federal governments are responsible for funding many of the social issues in Abbotsford. The city should involve itself in these issues in other ways. Our suggestion to you last year was not without serious consideration.

The ARA would like to propose the creation of a Community Development Corporation or CDC. This not-for-profit corporation would provide social planning and coordinating services to the City of Abbotsford and would be self-funding. The most famous and oldest CDC in Canada is New Dawn Enterprises located in Nova Scotia. Founded in 1976, New Dawn employs 175 people tasked with seeking out and developing new ventures, both commercial and non-profit, that serve community needs.

This same CDC would also be tasked with Economic Development. That may sound like a lot of responsibility, but New Dawn was a founding member of the Canadian Economic Development Network. So I repeat that a self-funded CDC in Nova Scotia with 175 employees coordinates both Social and Economic Development. Mr. Mayor, I have a great deal more information on CDC’s if you and Council would like to hear it at a later date. Removing both the Social Planning and Economic Development Departments from the City’s operational budget would translate into nearly $1 million in annual savings.

The “millions” in our presentation are beginning to add up Mr. Mayor and we have yet to give anything up.

I have one more example because it will segue into my closing remarks

Recently, the City announced Phase 3 of the Discovery Trail project. To date a total of $6 million will have been committed to this project. This is a waste of our money.

75% of our geography is farmland, we have over 1000 parks and trails, according to Parks & Recreation, and we have chosen to spend millions of dollars on paving a trail through the woods. We believed that we had representatives on this Council that were concerned about the environment, but I guess the idea of a park and some Provincial money outweighed the effect of dumping tons of asphalt into the forest, wetlands, lowlands and green spaces around Abbotsford was just too tempting. I wonder if any of that asphalt could have fixed some of our roads?

Before you think I’m picking on you, we fully understand that the Provincial Government co-funded that project and that the money would not have come here if it weren’t spent on the trail. You are all used to people in town telling you to turn the money down. However, we have a different approach.

We believe that communities should have the choice of how to use Provincial money. After all, it is our money too and the Provincial government should not impose its priorities on us. Most of the projects the Province has been funding in Abbotsford are not required here, but make sense in urban areas. Bike lanes aren’t needed on country roads, paving a trail through the woods is not needed here, urban areas need a Friendship Garden…we do not. These 3 projects alone resulted in almost $5 million of Provincial money being spent on things few Abbotsford residents would consider a priority.

So what do we do about that?

We’ve already casually floated the idea to two of our MLA’s that cities should have the choice to spend designated Provincial money or to have it set into an escrow account. A city like Abbotsford would then be able to build that account and then re-apply to the Province to use it for something truly important to us. Cities could aggregate their accounts and use the money collectively to solve problems like our own water supply issues that we share with Mission and others in the Valley.

We are even looking into whether the Province has the Constitutional right to force cities into spending tax money on non-priorities. Ear marking funds for a project is one thing, but totally denying any funding but those earmarked may be unconstitutional. Any basis in that and the Province would surely be open to a new plan.

Mr. Mayor, we call on you to champion an initiative like this one instead of spearheading a Gas Tax. The chance of successfully creating a Provincial funding escrow account is considerably higher than receiving permission to levy a gas surcharge.

Between now and the next UBCM, the ARA will happily work with City staff to formulate a proposal that will see a new financial relationship with the Province begin. We’ll take on a research role, we’ll play liaison with the Province, whatever it takes, but we can’t continue to be forced into throwing our Property Taxes away because the Province thinks we want a paved path through the woods. The Discovery Trail funding alone translates into almost a 3% Property Tax increase and that’s the City of Abbotsford’s portion. Also wasted were our income tax dollars and more. A UBCM resolution will give cities a new funding option not tax related and the Province will feel the benefit of positive funding instead of forcing it upon us for unneeded projects.

Perhaps the biggest role the ARA can offer the City in working on an initiative such as this is our skill with media relations. As you may recall, in the time period that my letter went to the provincial government asking that they deny the Gas Tax application, I appeared for 3 consecutive weeks in the Province newspaper and was interviewed on CKNW for 8 minutes during the Wednesday morning rush hour, their busiest time slot with more than 250,000 listeners. 7000 people each month visit AbbotsfordToday.ca…that’s about 10% of our population when you remove those too young to read or that don’t have a computer. The ARA membership continues to grow and with the help of partner groups, we are now in direct contact with over 400 households and more than 500 businesses and community organizations.

Mr. Mayor, I continue to daydream about the day when I use that media time and exposure to promote a common goal for the City of Abbotsford instead of continuing our adversarial relationship.

Last year, the choices you had to make concerning the budget were difficult. This year, they are not. In November, we will present you with a detailed list of items that should not be funded or should be cut. These will include such items as:

• A 100% deferral of all non-maintenance related Parks & Recreation capital spending
• A continued hiring freeze
• A wage freeze for all non-union city staff
• No hiring of new police officers (we’ll provide details in November)
• The introduction of a motion at the Council table to explore the sale of Ledgeview Golf Course

I’m going to repeat my closing comments from last year. I fear that I will repeat them for many years to come, but I hope I’m wrong.

Ratepayers need to be included in this process earlier and in much more detail. We are way beyond a couple of charts and some power point slides in terms of our understanding of municipal finance. Last year, we took some educated guesses as to how the Budget would translate into actual fiscal impact on the city and we were right in virtually every instance. By the time we are finished speaking in November, you’ll have that from us again and I daresay we’ll be right again.

We long to be wrong and the lessons for improvement are all around us. The City of Winnipeg just announced its 12^th year in a row of 0% Property Tax increase and actually lowered its business taxes. Rumour has it the Township of Langley is struggling to decide what to do with a cash surplus this year. They don’t know whether to build something or to pay down debt.

Instead of railing against these stories as an alien phenomenon, let us use them to inspire us to do better together.

Thank you,

Vince Dimanno
President - Abbotsford Ratepayers Association
Email: info@abbotsfordratepayers.org

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2009 - 2010 Abbotsford Ratepayers Association Budget Presentation Part II

The ARA would like to start by thanking Staff again for taking part in the exercise of listening to all the presentations and questions over these two nights of Budget Consultations.

The new format, begun in October and continued tonight, lends itself to a different kind of presentation from us than last year. Now that we’ve had one night of experience in this new format, we have modified our comments even further so that much of tonight’s speech is focused on you, the Staff.

It is our expectation that Mayor & Council will ask the Finance Department to return a Budget with a Zero Percent Tax Increase. We hope that the feedback, ideas and suggestions in the combined budget speeches delivered by the Abbotsford Ratepayers Association (ARA) will help staff achieve that goal.

Tonight we focus on Operational Budget items and it is this area where cuts and changes in policy and practices can have the biggest effect. Capital Project priorities change with funding, but the Operational Budget is always considered to be non-optional spending.

As you can imagine, we are here tonight to tell you that there are many items in the Operational Budget that are optional.

We want to re-iterate briefly that the ARA would like to see this Budget consultation process change even further. City Staff has been very receptive to ongoing dialogues with the ARA around the Budget, but we do feel that the communication must be “two-way”.

For example, staff takes its direction on spending priorities from Council. That information is almost never shared with the public. We’ve seen lists of Capital projects, but not a priority listing. Additionally, and to be proactive, taxpayers would like to see a priority list of future capital projects and increases in operational spending. I’ll illustrate this further with two examples.

The first example is a capital project….Section 4 of the Discovery Trail. Since this project has not been started, we can unequivocally tell you that taxpayers do not want hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on paving that trail. No true environmentalist could possibly approve of dumping asphalt onto a nature trail and we don’t want to pay for it. The Discovery Trail is not and never will be Mill Lake. That capital project, partly funded by the Province of BC is the perfect opportunity to go back to the provincial government and negotiate a better way to spend our tax money. It is not a community priority and we very much doubt anyone in our municipal government has taken the time to tell the province this. Rather, we take the cash, match it and press on no matter what. Every penny being spent on that Trail is our money and we want our roads fixed before we build one in the middle of the forest. MLA’s also please take note of this.

From an operational perspective, despite hiring freezes, both the Water and Sewage Departments had matching increases in administrative costs totalling $600,000 per year beginning in the last budget. That’s a lot of new paper clips and there is no explanation for the increase. Feel free to comment on this item at the end, but when an increase is unsupported then in the minds of taxpayers, it can be cut. These aren’t small dollars.

As a representative organization for local ratepayers, we want to be able to say:

“Why is that money going there?’ and we want to be able to follow it up with:

“There is no value to us in spending that money so let’s work together on ways to cut it.”

Let’s talk about that statement…”find a way to cut it”. I can already hear City Council responding with “That’s easy to say, but there is no way to cut it”. There’s always a way and we have some for you tonight.

It is generally accepted that a municipal government is responsible for a short list of major areas of spending. They are: fire, police, road maintenance, recreation and water & sewer.

It is our general comment that the City of Abbotsford needs to revisit its priorities in these areas and find new ways to deliver them, and, remove itself from activities not related to these core responsibilities.

One of the ways that we must change how we do business is community policing. We suggest that not one new dollar is added to the Abbotsford Police Department budget. This includes a hiring freeze at every level.

Why do we suggest this?

Giving the Abbotsford Police more money has not produced results.

Representatives from different departments in the City come before Council and regularly cry the blues for funding and then tell Council just how wonderful a job they are doing. That’s not good enough for the ARA. We need statistics on which to base our opinion and Council should use those same statistics on which to base their decisions.

So, while the APD claims a lower crime rate, that claim is a generalized statement. The # of violent crimes in Abbotsford has gone up every year since 2005, the number of sexual offenses has gone up every year since 2006, and the number of Motor Vehicle thefts has doubled since 1999.

The excuse of increased population doesn’t cut it. In 1999, Abbotsford reported a population of 116, 000 and in 2008 reported one of 133, 000, certainly not a doubling relative to motor vehicle thefts.

So what is the solution?

The ARA requests that Council ask staff to produce a report on the costs and benefits of converting our police force to the RCMP. We also suggest including the cost and benefits of supporting the creation of a Provincial police force.

Abbotsford has been called the murder capital of Canada, it is famous for grow ops, property crime, and gangs. The APD has been unable to make inroads into these statistics despite a regularly increasing budget. We must make a change and it must be a radical one. Let’s do a study and compare the outcomes in real data.

A change to RCMP is estimated to reduce our policing budget by as much as 10% and put 15 more officers on our streets.

Additionally, the ARA believes the City does not need a new Police Hall. Decentralizing into pseudo-precincts will save more than half of the estimated $60 million cost of a new mega-building.

Clearly changes must be made.

Another area of huge budget impact is Parks & Recreation.

During the last speech we gave, we made a mistake. We erroneously stated the Parks and Rec made up 20% of the 2008 budget. That is wrong. In fact, when you add-in all of their responsibilities, it totals 35% of that Budget.

From 2006 to 2007, the Parks & Rec budget doubled. From 2007 to 2008 it almost doubled again. In 2008, it was responsible for $85 million of City’s $245 million in expenditures.

That trend must change. Richmond’s Parks & Rec is responsible for 23% of its Budget, the Township of Langley is at 21% and Coquitlam is at 15%.

Plan A is no excuse. All of those cities built major recreational facilities in the last 2 or 3 years, they all have roughly the same or more population than Abbotsford.

The solution here is three-fold.

Firstly, stop! Stop spending money based on the outright lie that we are behind our neighbours. A report published in the Abbotsford News detailed that we spend more per capita on recreation and deliver fewer programs than anyone else in BC. We have double the number of trails that Coquitlam has and we dwarf most communities around us with the number of designated park spaces. Not only do we not need any more of either one of these but the money we spend on maintaining them is money that could have been spent on road maintenance. There is no excuse for one new dollar of Parks & Rec spending….not one dollar.

Secondly, Abbotsford must get out of the business of competing with the private sector.

The job of government is to essentially provide services and facilities to the community that the private sector will not. This is why we expect certain things to run at a loss. For example, any pool of a size to service a community will lose money. It is expected to lose money, but it provides a facility that seldom comes from the private sector.

This is not true of fitness facilities. A monthly pass to an Abbotsford Parks & Rec facility for an adult is $50. Abbotsford has priced itself out of the market and we are losing money because the community is not using our facilities. Most private fitness facilities in town range from $20 to $40 per month. Inform Fitness in Mission is $25 per month and for a savings of $300 per year, why would an Abbotsford resident go to an old local facility and pay more money?

So, $50 per month is what it costs to use ARC for example. Why? There are 3 senior managers at ARC and at least one of them is paid in excess of $100,000 per year. For that much money, they should be the only manager. When the City of Abbotsford tells us that all the staff in its employ are essential and we hear this, we lose faith in you. While we are the last to ever suggest issuing pink slips, it is obvious that two of these “managers” should be phased out.

We’ve got to take our losses on what we’ve done, but let’s not repeat the same mistake over and over. Obviously, we are unable to price our facilities competitively so there is no way we will be able to generate revenue competitively. We must get out of the “business” of recreational facilities and re-focus on areas of community needs. The community does not need a bigger weight room or a children’s play structure, but we are now one of the few cities with 100,000 people or more without a 50 metre pool.

Thirdly, we must get realistic about individual facility budgets.

For example, The Reach cannot be allowed to lose money. We don’t know what the projections are on revenue at The Reach, but we can guess it will show up with hat in hand and a loss on its books. Turn it away. Give The Reach a budget and if it can’t meet the number, then put someone in charge who can. The Museum doesn’t lose money so perhaps they should run The Reach if those in charge are unable to balance a budget. If they need more money, they must learn to generate more revenue.

The ARA has the memory of an elephant and you may all recall that it was part of the Plan A deal that The Reach would not cost taxpayers any money at all to run. Staff and Council must stick to that promise.

Additionally, Abbotsford should leave the Fraser Valley Regional Library system. It was reported a year or so ago that this would save us as much as $1 million annually. It has also been reported that there would be no capital cost to this, that network connections would be maintained, access to books and the internet would be maintained, and there would be no changes in services. Simply, we would save money year after year and this savings translates into saving a 1% property tax increase.

So, that’s Policing and Parks & Recreation…two of the five major areas of municipal responsibility. Fire Service and Road Maintenance, are both areas that as the City grows those services should grow with them. For example, we support the continued conversion to paid fire halls.

Life is a funny old thing where coincidences occur despite the best effort to avoid them. For example, there is approximately $32 million dollars in deferred road work in the current budget. We don’t think it is any accident that $32 million is almost exactly equal to the cost overruns on Plan A.

We touched on how to pay for some of that in our previous speech and today we bring up Plan A because it is also going add to our operational budget in a way that was never revealed to the public.

Now, we’re not going to start complaining about Plan A here. But, it must be talked about. Plan A will cast a financial shadow over this city for years to come. To deal with that burden we must bring it out into the light.

We’ve already stated that The Reach should not lose money, but likely will. The new ARC facility will lose $1 million each year, just like Mr. Pizzuto stated in his recent article in the Abby News of its counterpart MRC. We assume the numbers will be similar.

And it seems that Mr. Beck was right about the Abbotsford Entertainment & Sports Centre. He is famously quoted in the Abbotsford News as saying that the facility will either be a success and the City will have the money to solve the parking problem, or it will fail and there will be no parking issues.

Well, parking isn’t an issue.

We estimate that the Heat game attendance is right about where it was in Quad cities…averaging around 3500 per game. Global Spectrum’s own numbers state that attendance would need to be close to 6000 per game in order to make money. That projection was the basis for building a 7000 seat arena as demanded by their projections.

So what does that trip through memory lane mean?  For many months I have been projecting on Abbotsford Today that AESC may lose as much as $2 million per year.

So when the citizens of Abbotsford voted for an 11% increase in taxes for Plan A, no one told them that they would also need another 3.5% or more on top of that just to maintain those new facilities.

Since we must continue to support them, then staff and Council must resign themselves to stop doing things it has no business doing.

For example, we re-iterate that no taxpayer money should be spent on Social Planning. While the City certainly needs to be at the table, it should fund nothing. Not only does the Chairman of the Social Planning Committee say so repeatedly but other levels of Government agree.

The Federal Government, under Human Resources and Skill Development Canada has the Homelessness Partnering Strategy. The Partnering Strategy is a community-based program that relies on communities to determine their own needs and to develop appropriate projects. The Federal Government then funds them.

So while the City of Abbotsford has committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Social Planner, a Committee, staff and volunteer time, can you guess how much of that Federal money has been applied for and received??? Not one single penny.

It took us five minutes to find that Program online and the Abbotsford Social Development Advisory Committee has been at it now for 3 years, spending our money all the while.

We remind staff that we have the same philosophy about the Economic Development Department. We previously suggested that this be taken over by a non-profit Community Development Corporation and we repeat that suggestion as it affects the operational budget of the City.

Now, a note about the City’s communication strategy…Here in a time of financial crisis, the City of Abbotsford has decided to increase its newspaper advertising from ¾ of a page to as much as 4 pages of full colour advertising per issue of the Abby News.

No matter how good the rate per page, there is no way we should be spending thousands of dollars per issue more on advertising Toonie swims at ARC. The amount of advertising the City does is unprecedented. No other City spends that kind of money on distributing non-essential information.

Other cities like Coquitlam have started Facebook and Twitter feeds in order to do “free” things to distribute information instead of paying to print it. Every advertiser on the planet has figured out that print advertising cannot be the only part of a communication strategy and they adjust their budget accordingly and it has been adjusted down, not up.

While this is the very reason that the newspaper industry is struggling, it is not the job of taxpayers to prop them up. It is certainly not the responsibility of the City of Abbotsford to be the Gold sponsor of the local newspapers using our money. Go back to one page of your legally obligated notices and then get creative like our neighbours are doing. If you need ideas on how to accomplish this, we have many.

Here are two more ideas for City Staff to suggest to Council:

1. Complete the privatization of our garbage services. Winnipeg, a city that has had 12 years in a row of 0% property tax increases completed it’s privatization and saved $5.7 million.  For Abbotsford, this could translate into annual savings of more then $500,000 and remove the upward pressure on union wages in future years.
2. Sell or completely re-organize Ledgeview Golf Course. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the ARA reviewed the Golf Course’s Financial Statements. We became particularly interested in the Golf Course after it complained it would lose $200,000 a year or so ago. After reviewing their Statements, we can only conclude that this is a horribly run facility. As an example, in the Lounge area, the stated revenue for the year was approx. $500,000. The labour cost to serve that booze? $300,000. No bar or restaurant could survive on a 60% labour cost. None of that labour was pro shop or greenskeepers, etc. it was simply lounge labour. Can you imagine that for every $5 pint of beer it cost $3 to get it to the table???

   There is only one conclusion…the individuals in charge of Ledgeview have no idea how to run the facility. If no one can be found to correct the operation, the City should look for an outside operator, or sell the course all together.

So, now we have had two nights of passing on to you our thoughts. We are going to close by adding up for you, all of the cuts, savings and revenue generation we have suggested.

Parks & Recreation Capital and Operational spending                               $4 million

Change in Policing                                                                                                     $3 million

Changes to Library                                                                                                    $1 million

Change in Social Planning & Economic Dev. Depts.                                    $1 million

Cap Water & Sewer Admin Costs                                                                         $600,000

Privatize Garbage Collection                                                                                 $500,000

Reduce Communication Costs                                                                              $250,000

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Total Savings:                                                                                                              $10.35 million

Please add to that the new money we have suggested from our first speech including the Provincial Fund Escrow Account, the untapped Federal Grant monies, etc. for a total of $10.5 million. The ARA has then suggested more than $20 million in savings and revenue generation for the City of Abbotsford.

So, let’s be pragmatic for a moment. These numbers are far greater than the budget increase likely to be forwarded to Council. Therefore, even if our estimates are off by half, a 0% property tax increase is possible.

Frankly, the ideas we have heard from City Hall about new revenue generation are all just new taxes. For example, you can call it a Capital Levy, but that is just a Property Tax in disguise. Our suggestions are intended to give you a place to look for funds and savings without simply rebranding new tax dollars.

Politicians will balk at this. Listen closely and they’ll say things like “We can’t have a 0% increase or people will expect that every year”. That simply isn’t true.

The people of Abbotsford voted for an 11% tax increase for Plan A because you told them it was important to this City. The taxpayers were there for you…they made a hard decision and sacrificed for you… now it is your turn to show those same taxpayers that you can sacrifice for them.

Can we do it 2 years in a row? Maybe…maybe not, but you can count on the ARA to be right here with more ideas for you in 2010.

Thank you,

Vince Dimanno
President - Abbotsford Ratepayers Association