The new Town of Bonnyville council wasted no time getting down to business as the dove into preliminary budget talks.
CAO Mark Power gave a detailed description of the first draft during the town's council meeting Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2017.
As of the report, the town expects to take in $13,354,813 in revenue while incurring $15,938,756 in expenditures.
“There is a huge deficit, but there always is in the first draft of the capital budget. This is the one where the decisions are simple. Council makes them, and expenses are gone, or council makes them, and we've got to find a way to come up with more money,” detailed Power.
The largest expense outlined is the town's $7.2 million contribution to the regional waterline. The budget also sees just over $2.5 million set aside for streets and paving, and another $2.8 million for infrastructure replacement.
Some of the priorities the town has set out with the streets and paving budget include upgrading commercial alleys downtown ($120,000), and the annual $1.3 million dollar road overlay program.
A total of $735,177 has also been set aside for the town to continue renovations to the Bonnyville swimming pool. This would bring the total cost of work the town hopes to complete on the pool to $7.5 million.
“We're going to carry over the work to the roof into next year, and then we've identified around another $500,000 in work we would like to complete next year,” explained assistant CAO Bill Rogers. “In total we've identified $8 million dollars in work that, if we had the money right now, would be a great alternative to a new $40 million swimming pool.”
Administration has also included a number of items into the $252,000 budget allotted to parks and sports fields in Bonnyville.
The town intends to carry over work on the playground structure at Beauvista Park, install washrooms at the splash pad, and canvas locations for a possible off leash dog park.
“We wanted try to get washrooms similar to the ones they have in Leduc where they clean themselves. They slice dice and Julienne, but they cost $300,000, we applied for a grant but didn't get it. We'll look to carry over the $150,000 we set aside last year to look at other options,” explained Power.
Council will have plenty of time to balance the budget before the final version is submitted in May 2018, but with a $2.5 million deficit to erase, mayor Gene Sobolewski acknowledged there was a lot of work to be done.
“If everything stayed the same when next year rolls around, we have to look at what we are going to do. We're going to have to cut some services unless we can find additional supplemental revenue sources, that's the picture that's being painted right now,” he said.
