Budget surplus helps reduce property tax ask
Councillors add new bus purchases to 2025 budget
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/01/2025 (316 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Surplus cash, a couple of opportune housekeeping decisions, and a little financial hand up from the province helped reduce the City of Brandon’s 2025 Budget taxpayer ask by several percentage points on Saturday.
City councilors went into the second day of budget deliberations with a proposed budget that called for an 11.7 per cent increase in property taxes, and ended the day having whittled it down to a 6.9 per cent increase in the municipal portion a resident’s tax bill.
For a single-family residential property assessed at $301,300, that that works out to a total of $2,300.88 per year — a reduction of slightly more than $100 from the earlier proposed budget.
“There was good discussion and debate at the table,” Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett told the Sun on Saturday afternoon. “I’m really proud of the council we have, because there’s lots of varying opinions. There’s not really blocks, there’s people who think things through.”
As expected, council’s largest discussions centred around fleet replacement and maintenance costs and a reduction in new hire costs. But there was also full agreement by councilors that the city needed to start moving forward with new bus purchases for Brandon Transit in this calendar year instead of pushing it into 2026, as the vehicles take several years to get built and delivered.
“I think that’s important,” Fawcett said. “A lot of our costs are tied to Transit right now, and so we’re doing all kinds of work with refurbishing, which is necessary, because refurbishing is now. We’re going to order two buses that won’t be here for four years, probably, and next year we’ll have that discussion again.
“I’m excited about this year, because we’re going to look at that transit plan and over the next number of years, it could substantially change how we get around the city.”
At the start of the budget meeting on Saturday, the City’s director of finance, Troy Tripp, informed council of an unexpected increase in the expected surplus funds from the 2024 budget, moving up from the originally forecast $1.7 million to nearly $2 million. About one million had already been accounted for in the 2025 proposed budget, but the extra $900,000 in surplus funds significantly reduced the city’s tax needs.
“The fact that there was $900,000 of surplus that dropped, and that almost drops at two per cent, but as the discussion around the team said… that is money that was paid by the taxpayer. It was intended to be used and for whatever reasons it wasn’t,” Fawcett said. “So it goes back in to reduce.”
Fawcett also once again credited a million dollar grant for the Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium announced Friday by the provincial government in helping to reduce the city’s budget, as well as a significant correction to the expected operations budget for the Maple Leaf Soccer Complex, which dropped by $250,000 between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning in the proposed budget document — a $250,000 decrease.
“There was a fairly significant correction to the proposed budget and we hope we’re within that. I believe we will be, because we’re likely not on those fields until July this year,” Fawcett said.
Some of the major projects supported in Budget 2025 include:
• $30.7 million for wastewater infrastructure enhancements and preservation, including the Southwest Wastewater Servicing Project
• $18.2 million for various fleet projects, including the purchase of two transit buses and refurbishment of the remaining transit fleet
• $18.9 million for land drainage improvements, including the Southeast Drainage Project
• $16.1 million for facilities, including a new and secondary Police Operations Centre
• $12.8 million for Parks & Recreation Services, including upgrades to Brandon’s Community Sportsplex arena, Maple Leaf Foods Sports Complex, and various playground replacements
• $1.2 million for solid waste projects, including a diversion depot and an AI system for collection trucks
See more on Budget 2025 in Monday’s Brandon Sun E-edition.