Brandonites can expect to pay more in taxes in 2025: Mayor

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This article was published 28/12/2024 (337 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As part of our now-annual custom, Brandon Sun editor Matt Goerzen sat down for a year-end interview with Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett on Dec. 20. Fiscally, 2024 has been more difficult for both city residents and the city’s administration and council alike, with several difficult decisions being made regarding ongoing housing projects and expansion, and taxation, even as questions have been raised regarding the city’s continued affordability. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Matt Goerzen (MG) — Jeff, how are you doing?

Jeff Fawcett (JF) — How do I feel? I’m tired. Really tired.

MG — It’s been a difficult year.

JF — There’s been a lot going on.

MG — Yeah, there has been a lot going on. Just from your vantage point, I mean, you’re watching a city kind of reveal itself (to you) over the last couple of years. How do you feel the direction of the city is going? Positive? Negative? Where are we in the grand scheme of where you want to see the city?

JF — You know what? I think that it’s very positive, but it’s like anything that’s growth. You know, when they say growing pains. You know, as a child, you literally feel them sometimes. As a business, growing pains can be quite difficult, and mistakes can get made like, you know, sometimes it’s always safer to just, let’s not, let’s stay. But we are growing you know, we have our numbers that have, even just this year, good housing increased by over 100 you know, units, and that’s just in the residential. And like, into good, significant numbers on growth. We are having to do these large infrastructure (projects), we just have to do these things so that we build this better future. And either we don’t, and I don’t know where that goes, or we do, and we kind of deal with the uncomfortableness sometimes and get to those better places. Although, that being said, we are in a good place right now. There’s a lot of real positive things going on.

MG — How do we compare to Winnipeg? Mayor Gillingham, initially, when he came to be mayor, he ran on a promise that he wouldn’t really raise taxes beyond a certain level, and yet he’s had to do just that.

JF — I speak with Mayor Gillingham quite frequently. It’s very important that we have a very good relationship. And I’m going to just tell you on another little note on that, positions like this might be the loneliest position you can find. So actually, having you know some of the mayors out there, Winkler and Steinbach and Selkirk and Portage, Winnipeg, Thompson there. It’s sometimes nice to be able to just have somebody call you and say, how’s it going? Because it’s never that easy, and you always got to be on, but Scott and I’ve had a very good relationship. He’s the one that really pushed to say, hey, you need to make sure you get a four-year budget in place now. And he did have one. He had a fixed four-year budget. And so that was one of the reasons that we pushed to get this MNP study. We pushed to get this, you know, let’s try to create a four-year budget. Of course, I wasn’t hoping it would come back, saying 13 per cent a year for the next four years, but we deal with what we do.

MG — And it hasn’t been 13 per cent.

JF ­— No, it hasn’t been because it also wasn’t etched in stone, right? … Being able to talk to Henry Siemens out in Winkler, who was ahead of us on this so, you know, they were over eight per cent prior to us. How are you managing that? And so, Scott and I talked a lot prior to him needing to do this bump. But just out of curiosity, I was looking at our MNP report the other day where all these numbers were written. (The city had hired accounting firm MNP LLP to consult on a range of financial issues). Of course, we can go way back. They went to 2018, so Winnipeg isn’t in a great spot. But since 2018 up to 2023 they raised their taxes, 16.59 per cent. We raised ours 3.93 per cent (in that time). Now that, of course, goes way back further, so they’re not in a good spot. And over the last number of years, they’d raised it by almost 17 per cent you know. So even adding in 2024 with them and their increase and in ours, we’re up to now 13.3 per cent (since) 2018, they’re still at 20. I know their hope is to go back to 3.5, but 3.5 last year they were cutting.

MG — They’re having to cut various things off the budget they can’t afford. Now they’re asking for a new deal with the province, just as the province has come out saying, ‘Hey we’re in a massive deficit situation and it’s getting worse.’

JF — Yeah.

MG — How likely do you think it is? Should Winnipeg be getting such a new deal right now? The City of Brandon for example is trying to take care of itself, though its not completely on its own …

JF — I’ll tell you this, Matt; by doing that, it does help in a discussion with the federal and provincial government. When you go to the table and say, here’s what we’re doing, you know, you aren’t there with just a hand out. It is like we are doing something. We need you to work with us. And yes, it is a big concern. There’s going to be a lot of negotiating over the next little while, because, you know — do the provincial and federal governments have more money than municipal? Yeah, absolutely, they have lots. But they can also run massive deficits. They can also do all kinds of other things that we can’t, which is probably just as well, that we can’t, you know. We are really fixed to what we can do. You know, obviously we’re going to have some kind of change of government federally as well. And you know, it’ll be very interesting to see what that means for municipalities.

MG — OK, we’ve got higher fees (in Brandon), because every year they go up, even just going to the dump. What is it now, $7 just …

JF — It stayed (at) seven. Almost everything else is up about three per cent.

MG — You’ve got higher water rates.

JF — Yes. And just to help you, development cost charges that are increasing.

MG — Yes, if you want to buy a house …

JF — There’s a quartet of things.

MG — There absolutely is. Are we in danger of becoming an unaffordable city for people who live here?

JF — No.

MG — Why is that?

JF — Is it going to be a bit tighter? Yeah, probably. And it is definitely more noticeable when you send out a tax bill once a year without question. And so you look at it, and it’s the largest sort of tax bill you get unless you’re … a person that makes tax payments to the government through the year on incomes and things like that. It’s probably the largest single bill you get from a government. But for a lot of people, it is like it’s overall the cost of everything. Not everybody knows how much PST they spent in the last three months, you know, including coming off your checks, including, you know, all the other monies. But you do know what you got in the mail from the city for that time. I’ve been very fortunate in talking to a lot of people that do understand that, you know, we can’t let things decay. We can’t let things go down, but we do have to pay to maintain things. We do have to pay to grow. And, you know, even things that are tough for us to do like we’re going to make decisions like we like we need to get our reserves back up. And does that add to the tax bill? Yes, it does, but we need to get them back up for reasons.

MG — Emergencies.

JF — Yeah, and for long-term planning, so that we don’t continually need to be kind of going to the well every time for more money if anything comes up in that. But it does feel like everything at once. I’m very aware of that. There were issues with the PUB (Public Utility Board) stuff that we have now eliminated. So, we’re not going to see the big spikes like we used to. We are going to manage that differently going forward. You know, it was always a question that we’d asked, you know, how can we go five or six years with, like, “flat?” Of course, you have to go up crazy, and it’s no good. And we had to do that again, and then, with all the work that we’re doing, and it’s going even higher. But now we know that, you know, once we get over the next three, four years, where it’s going to get close to double total from last year, that we should be at a more stable, regular increase. We hope to go there with everything.

MG — You and I have spoken about this before. You’ve been a councillor before for 12 years. Did you ever see this coming during that time? Where was that “aha” moment?

JF — Well, the “aha” moment was kind of getting into the mayor’s chair a little bit more. And then the scream-in-your-face moment was kind of the MNP report finalizing with the sort of third-party look. Non-political, you know, non-corporate. And also, just understanding even better that, you know — I was one of the people that … I wanted to make sure that the budget was good for that day, that year. Let’s make sure things are affordable going forward in this year. But it was, we were probably costing the future. And the decision I had to make — and our whole council — was, do we just continue to do that? Because you can kick things down the road, or you can address them. Because the reality is, we probably could kick things down the road, then we leave and someone else deals with it. We’ve decided to deal with it. And yeah, it’s not comfortable. It’s not at all what you want to do.

MG — Do you regret that lack of … foresight? For lack of a better word?

JF — No. At the time, I really believed we were doing the right thing for right then. And just like anything, you learn more as you go. There’s some growth and different things, and you think you know what — thought that was right at the time. And now here I still am and realizing, no. Like when we did the reserve cuts there, we did little things that we almost — like you took pleasure in doing it. Let’s say, you know, like, let’s do a vacancy management reduction because that’ll reduce taxes for this year. Because we knew, just with a large corporation like the city, there’s always some vacancy management. There are always people retiring, or people coming in for lower wages, or you can’t hire at the time. And so there was always about a million dollars in there. And so, we, one year, took a lot of heat for it is back in the (former city manager) Scott Hildebrand days, put in $600,000 and reduced the taxes, knowing the thing, you know, OK, we’re not going to have that, you know, it’s going to be about a million dollars. We just take that out of their 600 and we should be better off. Well, without really monitoring as close as probably we should have like that just it’s grown to the point that almost the city now budgets to not having staff and to keep taxes low.

MG — Mmm-hmmm.

JF – It hasn’t worked because now services have … it shows.

MG – Right.

JF – And we are really struggling. How much catching up do you do at one time? And we’re doing a lot. And we’re very aware of it. Like, you know, how many times can you put your hand on your head and think taxes, water, you know, the DCCs, you know, which does help some people on the other end. There’s quite a bit. It’s heavy.

MG – Without a doubt. But how does that change the way you manage? I mean, you’ve worked with Mayor Chrest before. You’ve watched him handle things. I mean, by all accounts at the time, he was handling things as most councils would I think. As team Brandon, we were all together. It was a team effort. How has this reality changed how you look at being the mayor?

JF – I’m very fortunate, because the collection of councillors is still very strong. You have a very good diversity of opinion on there. But yeah, I just thought I have to make sure that we leave it in a better spot. Someone will come in after and they’ll not be in position where they’re able to do the nice things. Right now for us to do the nice things, we have to have other levels of government help us, so our focus has really become like, what is core service? We have to make sure core services are done well. Like we’re doing everything we can with snow removal right now. Three plows go out. Snow just keeps coming. I was over there at 7:30 yesterday morning to see a bunch of people. They were going out. They go 24/7, you know. Something that really hurt us this year was, we did have a tax increase, even though nobody had got their bills yet, but the province hadn’t mowed the boulevards. We worked that through, not in time for it to (not) be painful. It’ll be better going forward. We’ve got agreements. What we’re doing with them there now is, that’s the core service stuff. That’s the things you see, the basics of what people want to try to do the snow removal the best you can, which we’re trying.

MG – So forgive me if I harp on this, and it’s something I’ve been bugging mayors about for the last … damn, it’s about to be 12 years. What is your vision now for the city? You’re two years in, you’ve had a look at the books, you’ve seen where we need to go. That vision you spoke of becoming Manitoba’s second city, put that aside for a moment. What do you want the city to become?

JF – Well, a bit more of like a destination city where people want to come, raise families, grow up here, be able to stay, if they can. Like, I think the college and the university play a much bigger role. They think they do. But, you know, the college continues to do more things that bring in new technology. All the Ag stuff that they’re starting to bring in, like, that’s AI stuff, that’s advanced technology stuff, and hopefully we can get more community spin off into that as well. The medical school work with the University of Manitoba. That’s high priority. BU now has a great team over there working with the U of M, working with the province, very confident in that. But again, things move at the pace of government, but it is moving. That sort of says we’re also the big regional hub. There we are the definitive place between Winnipeg and Regina. We make Manitoba stronger, you know. A stronger Brandon helps Winnipeg, and we need a strong Winnipeg as a province, no question about it. And so sort of a leader in the province. We question we have to be a leader in the province. And I think that we are.

MG – Circling round, we have not yet seen a budget come out, a proposed budget. Has discussion gone yet about what that proposed – I assume increase, based on the four-year plan – is going to look like?

JF – Well, I tell you right now, last year, the end of the budget year – because we’ll see, this is what our budget is for this year. And with that, this is how next year will look. And at that time last year’s budget was 11.5 per cent. But, of course, we’ve got to work at that.

MG – Right.

JF – So I would not expect that we’ll have 11.5. It may still show up somewhere around that for us, but…

MG – Under the proposed budget?

JF – Under the proposed budget. It’s still not impossible that it’s similar to what the projection was at last year’s. But again, like you, I just don’t know if we have the ability to do that. Just, you know, we’ll have to still get tight on things and bring it down. But this we still want to project because, like, ultimately, I want within, I know, another two years, three years, to start getting down to these more modest, you know, like, Winkler. They’re kind of at a steady five right now. After a few years, you can justify that. You know, we have just. Just to do our day-to-day operations the same as we did last year, we’re at about a four per cent increase. That’s just the cost of doing everything. It’s just the cost of the things that the city has to buy. Same as anybody else. Some of it’s more expensive. That’s the cost of wages continuing to go up for everybody. Just to continue the path of trying to revamp our reserves where they need to be, because we, like we were down a lot right over the years in our reserves to keep taxes as low as we could. We’re probably about another three per cent you know, and that’s just status quo, and trying to start bringing reserves back. We’re starting at a bit of a base, probably close to a base seven, and that’s not including any enhancements anywhere. It will be tight.

MG – What do you say to people who are saying that Brandon doesn’t have the amenities they want, like a water park? From what I’ve been hearing and reading and understanding over the last few years, we’re not in any position to look for those things yet.

JF — Well of course we’re in the position to do homework on them. I’ll give you an example. We need to do something with the library downtown, and the only way we are is with major federal and provincial money. We can’t do it. We’d love to, it would be an enhancement for the community, but we just, we can’t take that on our own. The Keystone does need things, and we’re going to get in on that. The province, I believe, will be willingly doing that with us as well. I think we’ve made really good movement at the Keystone. It’s a big asset to us, and so we want to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the same situation as the city kind of has, which it did. With its increases, it had to do even more so coming out of COVID, but they’re back on track. In the smaller communities around us, which are awesome, and I always want them to be as strong as possible. Almost all of their water parks and things like that are publicly fundraised. And we’re at a size where we don’t tend to do that.

MG — Ok.

JF — The community just doesn’t get together and say, well, maybe we’ll come up with the first $5 million or $10 million to do a $20 million water park. So, yeah, it’s just not, unfortunately, on the radar right now, maintaining everything we’ve got the best we can is. But our community is also buying into some things and realizing the value. Like as small as it might seem, you know, there’s the three or four big sculptures going in down at the Peter Sawatzky Sculpture Garden at the riverbank. That’s the public doing that. It’s a public sort of saying, like we live in this community, we want to see these kinds of things. These are the beautiful things that nobody wants the city putting money into the, you know, the maintenance of the grounds and things like that sort of act does.

You know, there’s no question people like Gord and Diane Peters are making a difference in Brandon. You know, the people like the Murray Group with their Cancer Care house – that matters. That builds communities. And in the smaller communities, you do see a lot of that, and Brandon is getting there. I think that the community will also start stepping up and say, you know, while we’re doing all this other stuff, let’s help build this community.

MG — On a slightly different note. (Brandon-Souris MP) Larry Maguire. Say that he doesn’t continue on into the next federal election …

JF — I can’t see Larry Maguire not wanting to be in government …

MG — Well, suppose at some point that he decides not to. You have been named by several people as potentially filling that role or trying for that role. Is that even on your radar?

JF — No, not at all. I’m completely municipal right now. I love going home at night. I gotta tell you, like I am not thinking that. But I remember talking to Merv Tweed years ago — who was an MLA, an MP, and then finished as a mayor — and Merv saying, oh my goodness, like you never leave when you’re the mayor. Like you are here all the time, like there’s no in-between, like you are on all the time. That is heavy, and I can appreciate that a little more, now. That said no, you know, I work with the governments, and no, I don’t at all. Right now, I really like being at home at night.

MG — Fair enough, I can appreciate that, believe me. In this industry that I’m in, I’m editor all the time. It doesn’t matter where I am.

JF — You always have to be on.

MG — In the same way council would be, the same way you have to be careful. It’s a tough one.

JF — But I do love the people. That’s my favourite part. Like it’s my absolutely favorite part, is everybody. I always say to people, I wish I could take you around with me to everything I get to go to so you’d see how awesome the people in this community are. Like, I get the luxury of going to everything. I can’t wait to get there. People are happy. There’s, you know, it’s the events I’m going to often. But even, you know, I drop in at a lot of places, and I talk to people. I walk down sometimes to do one of the Brandon Sun coffees, and I talk to the people just on the street.

And I love the approachability. I love that people come and talk to me. I love going to the library, and there may be people that aren’t working or, you know, at the library, a lot there, and I get I enjoy it, because they’ll ask about, why don’t you guys get in that traffic circle on Braecrest on 18th you’ve been talking about that forever. They read the paper all the time. They’re very informed, and they go right into a discussion with me. I quite enjoy it.

But yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot going on and, you know, I do hope that we’ll have a city manager named here very, very shortly. I hope that can give you some coverage in between Christmas and New Year’s and but you know what, one of the reasons I ran is, I did think that Ron would be here all the way through, and I really know that that was a huge benefit to (former mayor) Rick Borotsik having Earl Backman in there, so he got to be the mayor, not the city manager. This is quite a distinction.

MG — This kind of touches on a question I had, based on everything that you’re trying to do, and that council and a whole host of other people are trying to do…. From your start two years ago as mayor, is the city safer?

JF — You know, I would like to say that the city is safer with our cadets that we did not have two years ago downtown. The feedback I get is very positive. So that’s just there. There’s no question that retail theft is a problem across the country, and that doesn’t exclude Brandon and our teams have been out there working on that. But I do think, relative to a lot of places, we are safe. We have a good police force. We have great paramedics. As a matter of fact, if our services have increased anywhere it’s in those areas, but there is a lot. There is a lot, you know, and we were regional hub for everything.

MG — Are we getting cleaner?

JF — Well, that’s an optics one. And so like last year was really bad because the province didn’t have the boulevards (done) like, which are pretty important boulevards in our city. We need to make sure of that. And I gave an example earlier, just even the downtown with the Fresh Start program, like consciously, people going out every day, just cleaning up stuff. And again, last year was a trickle out effect, because suddenly we were doing some of that mowing. So we made our parks not look as good because we weren’t on that. It was not great.

MG — So, all things being equal, is the city more livable?

JF — I’d like to think so. Yeah, absolutely. I’d like to think so.

MG — Taxes included?

JF — Everybody would like to pay less for everything, no question about it, you know. But we’re going to be making it to continue to be more livable by doing what we’re doing. But it is, yeah, we have a couple of years of making sure that it is, so there’ll be an adjustment. And as we said, like, you know, I know it is like it’s day to day things, you know, we’re only eight cents of that tax dollar. So for every tax dollar a person spends, like, eight cents of it is municipal, you know. And if that eight cents, it climbs to nine cents like that. If that’s what breaks us that’s not a great thing. And if we go to nine cents, the other ones are probably growing too, and we’re back to eight, but costs are going up for everything, including the (city) corporation. And if we were to keep things flat, it would mean you get less so we want to maintain and core services has got to be our focus. It’s always got to be our focus.

MG — How was the federal Accelerator Fund, in your opinion? Was it a good deal for the city?

JF — Yeah, it was. And one of the reasons is… the stuff that they were wanting people to do, or communities to do, we already did most of it. We actually couldn’t go in on the great big amounts, because we already, you know, we did fourplexes on corners that we were already there. We’ve done that years ago. In the city, like, a great deal of growth has been densification, you know, infill. That’s been a major piece of our growth. Funding in a lot of the big cities, and that is, like, do more of that. And we’re already there so we can’t add to that a lot more. That’s the thing like, because we were already doing things that they were wanting us to do, you don’t get to apply for much, but, you know, even just only 80 units that go in there, that would be great.

MG — With Larry Maguire, assuming he continues on into the next election, would you be relying on him to try and mitigate some of the rhetoric that’s coming out of the Conservative Party right now against municipalities? You and I talked about this, the idea from Pierre Poilievre that municipalities are “swimming in cash” and that they’re demanding too much and getting too much.

JF — What I’ll say about the other level of politics, which is also why I’m not that interested, is, again, you know, we did a Brandon group out to Ottawa again this year. What most people don’t realize, everybody works together quite well … I’m not out here to promote Larry. I’ve known Larry a long time, and this kind of goes for everybody. But he’s not in government, and every minister and everybody else that I’m dealing with there asks: So is Larry aware? Does Larry know he’s your representative? I always say, yes, Larry knows. Larry’s completely informed, and you can follow them. And almost everybody’s got good (comments) … ‘Larry’s a good guy. I like working with Larry.’ And you know what? As the mayor of Brandon, I felt just a little taller. I’m glad you think our guy’s a good guy because he’s representing us. You may not agree on the political and God willing you don’t count on what you see on the question period. But you know, working in there, working hard. And they all are, all the parties. When I’m in Winnipeg, everybody’s working hard. Opposition, by its nature, they have to kind of be sometimes be oppositional. I think that whatever happens, I think our plan right now would be to do another Ottawa run in 2026 spring.

MG — As far as the year end and the look ahead to next year and 2025 is there anything that you’d like to see or are hoping for in 2025 that you’d like to see come to fruition?

JF — Yeah, you know, I want to see that second lift station started. I want to see them started on the water treatment plant site’s phase two. I want to see people playing soccer and cricket, you know, in the spring. Want to see kids skating at the Sportsplex inside. I want to see the idea of a school being built, probably in the West End, somewhere southwest there. I want to see us move a bit further so people could tangibly see where we’re going with the medical school. I’m hoping within the next month, smaller things like that, we would have on the website or an app, something to show where the plows are, the GPS, where are they? Where are they, right now, you can go on your phone and say, Oh, that’s where they are. Okay, they’re in my neighborhood. They should be here shortly. Give us about a month to try to get that out. I’d like to see the transit plan start to take good fruition. I’d like to see that, you know, like, how close are we to the 18th street route, you know, 15-minute pickup and bang, bang, bang, across the city, you know, like, our goal there is to make it, and this is going to take a few years. If I was going to give you my biggest disappointment, it’s not getting the Memorial Cup. We had an exceptionally good bid. The province was all in. We were going to do everything we could. We had a great bid. I can make excuses as to why it is where it is, whatever the mayor from there did contact me right after it was announced and invited me out for the Memorial Cup with the hopes that the Wheat Kings would be out there. And I plan to go, because I do hope them to be out there, and I hope they win, and I hope we bid on the next one, because the community loves that stuff, and I know, and I applaud the province for participating as much as they were on.

MG — Fair enough. Thanks Jeff.