(file photo/meadowlakeNOW Staff)

By Angela Brown

Budget 2024

Meadow Lake council passes budget with four per cent tax increase

Dec 18, 2023 | 4:07 PM

The City of Meadow Lake will see a four per cent increase to property taxes for 2024 as approved by city council at its last meeting.

Mayor Merlin Seymour told meadowlakeNOW the city needed to have a tax increase to compensate for inflationary costs.

“The cost for everything is going up, whether it be wages, fuel costs, or normal day-to-day activities, improvements we’re trying to make, making things more efficient,” he said. “Two or three years ago we held taxes at zero [per cent increase], and we did get a little bit behind because of the [ongoing] increases.”

Seymour added council decided if the city was going to keep moving forward as best and efficiently as possible, they have to look at somewhat of an increase just to keep up with the cost of everything.

“If we don’t keep up with it, services are going to have to start being cut, and we don’t want to do that,” he said. “A minor increase is what we had to look at.”

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Policing costs are also increasing, furthering the need for a tax increase.

“Policing costs did go up substantially last year, primarily because of the RCMP contract,” Seymour said. “They didn’t have a contract for about two years previously, so with their new contract the costs did jump substantially. That’s a part of the [need for a] property tax increase as well, just to offset a little bit of that.”

Looking at the year ahead, the city is planning a number of projects it will be involved with.

It will continue with its Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund work for infrastructure improvements on the East Side of the city, a 10-year project. The initiative was co-funded by a grant from the federal government.

Seymour said there are a number of different components to the project, the most significant being making improvements to the existing infrastructure.

“The water lines and the sewer lines were basically in the same trench, so if there was a failure there was a possibility of contamination of the water,” he said. “We’re doing approximately $1 million [worth] a year in that project.”

In 2024 the work is expected to be about a $1.5 million value, because in the previous year some of the work was delayed due to wet weather.

Some of the other projects the city will take up include the work on the natural gas replacement and full depth rehabilitation on Third Avenue.

The city will also continue with its large-scale capital project to build a replacement to the arena, an initiative expected to be completed in March of 2025.

“I do know that nobody likes tax increases, but as I said before: If we don’t have a slight increase to cover the costs of operations, we would have to look at some other way of keeping the services up,” Seymour said. “That’s kind of where we are at with the four per cent [increase].”

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Angela.Brown@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @meadowlakenow