(File photo/northeastNOW Staff)

By Ben Tompkins

Slight tax increase

Town of Tisdale approves 2023 budget

Mar 13, 2023 | 3:29 PM

The Town of Tisdale has now officially approved its budget for the 2023 year.

At its last meeting, council announced an operating budget of $10,243,000 and a municipal tax increase of 1.625 per cent.

Chief Administrative Officer Brad Hvidston told northeastNOW they wanted to keep the increase as low as possible as residents are dealing with enough rising costs as it is.

“People have seen the costs of everything go up, so we were just seeing if we could cut enough corners and make things work to give everybody a little bit of relief from all those cost increases.”

This will include the town maintaining the current rates of their water and sewer utilities, for the next twelve months.

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“We decided to hold the water and sewer utility rates for this year,” Hvidston added. “We don’t anticipate we’ll be able to do that again next year, but we thought for one year we’ll try that, and hopefully, it works out.”

Tisdale doesn’t currently have any big projects on the go for this year, as they will just continue with their paving program, waterline replacement projects, and road improvement plans on Heritage Road.

“Paying down debt, with no new borrowing in the forecast for this year, that’s about the nuts and bolts of it,” Hvidston explained. “We definitely can’t go backwards, we need to keep maintaining our capital and keep maintaining the infrastructure that we have, but I guess we just kind of went away from any frills and whistles for this year.”

The cost of borrowing is also something on council members’ minds, as the town and its citizens will have to deal with that pressure.

For now, Tisdale will just have to work with what it’s got and hope next year isn’t anything crazy.

“Council has been very responsible and thinking about the future too, so we do have reserve transfers that are going on to help us out for this year.

And while it may seem a bit late for a budget, already two months into the year, the community mentioned it’s always been done this way, and that there are actually some benefits.

“We kind of hold off on any new spending and just run status quo until we get our budget set, and don’t make any large new commitments just for that first little bit of the year,” Hvidston said.

“It kind of works two ways because we don’t get a lot of the government announcements and increases and rates yet until a little bit later in the year, so sometimes you can set your budget and then those numbers come in differently, so sometimes you get a little bit of an advantage because you know what those numbers are going to be by the time your budget rolls around.”

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