Budget talks continue in N. Battleford

“With that we need a $3,000 expense from 2025 to 2028, to be able to remediate the asbestos.”

The items had been presented at the special planning committee meeting on Jan. 9 for budget discussions and were brought back due to additional questions asked by the council.

The MRF software for ticket writing was also discussed. Currently, all tickets are handwritten by the CSOs. During an earlier meeting, Lindsay Holm, director of protective services said the new software will have the capability to do in-car ticketing and also compile and maintain a database.

The initial startup will cost $24,000, which Holm called “the best money we’ll ever spend.”

Before that software can be implemented, however, the current software will still be used from January to September. As such, after reviewing the operating budget, city administration said there is a proposal of $10,000 for the current software.

“We have to operate it in 2025 for part of the year,” said Pena of the coming transition.

“We don’t have a operating budget for the new software solution because that has been included in the capital request.”

Speaking to the Access Communications Centre budget which is $71,200 and up from the previous year’s $62,825, Pena specifically addressed the reason as to why there was a decrease of $3,000 for the janitorial services.

“Basically, the current service provider reduced their availability for 2025,” she said.

As a result, the administration has decided to use casual staff.

“To go in whenever they cannot go, we go in and try to keep it up that way.”

The biggest project to be discussed during the follow-up information session was in the Engineering, Planning, Asset Management and Infrastructure (EPAI) Services department.

The department, which has projected operating revenues of $535,220, there was a question about the project involving HWY 4 and West Territorial Dr.

“We have reviewed the information and the total project is $100,000,” she said of the EPAI initiative to paving and handling the shoulder of the new intersection.

Later on, which also included discussions on the waste management budget, Stewart Schafer, director of operations reported that operational revenue was expected to increase this year over last by roughly $33,000 to $462,500. The conditional grants, however, showed a different outcome and the department expected to drop to be $877, 523 from last year’s $919,000.

“That’s due to the population of the province increasing and we didn’t,” he said Canada Community-Building Fund (CCBF).

According to the proposed budget, in the public works section, the budget is expected to be $474,594 mostly due to wage increases, cost of living and reallocation of assets.

One of the areas that saw a decrease in the budget was in patching supplies such as asphalt and tools. The amount of $141,000 is down from last year’s $160,500.

“We, last year, thought we could do more than we could, we’re going to still keep on top of that,” he said.

Councillor Thomas (Bill) Ironstand asked if it was wise to cut the budget due to the number of potholes last year.

“We had a lot of streets that had a lot of potholes and we get a lot of ratepayers talking to us about that,” he said.

City Manager Randy Patrick explained that there was due to supplies.

“We can only do so much with the people we have, we didn’t want to waste money,” he said referring to buying too much and not being able to use it all.

“We did a pile of potholes this year, hopefully not as many next year.”

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julia.lovettsquires@pattisonmedia.com

On BlueSky: juleslovett.bsky.social

by Julia Lovett-Squires

Budget talks continue in N. Battleford

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