Members of city council turfed many ideas aimed at improving the budget process.
During a lengthy debate at Monday’s finance committee meeting councillors nixed several of the ideas that emerged from a debriefing held after the budget passed in December.
The most drastic change would have restricted budget meetings to once a week for a maximum of five weeks with each meeting starting at noon and lasting into the evening. The current process has council meet about a dozen times over a two-month period before passing the budget in late December.
“I have to work for a living,” said Coun. Roger Lemieux about the noon start times.
Coun. Cathy Heron didn’t like the early starts because they may have prevented viewers from watching at home via Shaw TV.
Councillors did agree to review the implications of posting all budget information online for easier access. They also agreed to have shorter presentations from city departments.
Other debates centred around which information to include or exclude from the hefty budget binders that draw many complaints from councillors and administrators. At the beginning of each budget cycle, each councillor is issued two 3.5-inch binders, which they haul to budget meetings and flip through continuously during meetings.
Mayor Nolan Crouse felt the binders are part of doing a hard job that carries a lot of responsibility.
“We’re paid $30,000 and $90,000 a year to do our job and if it means hauling stuff around … that’s the way life is,” he said. “I’m a little concerned with dummying this down to the point where we’ve hardly got anything.”
During last fall’s budget process, there were grumblings from council that the process could be less time-consuming and involve less paper. This led to a debriefing where council generated a raft of ideas that Couns. Malcolm Parker and Len Bracko spent weeks exploring.
Information like organizational charts, department mandates and business plans, which are included in the binders, are extraneous to financial decisions, Parker and Bracko felt.
“We get paid on the decisions we make and not on whether we carry heavy binders to budget meetings,” said Bracko.
“We just felt there’s a lot of information that’s not needed at budget time,” Parker said.
However, the majority of councillors felt otherwise.
“I would rather have more information than less information … if I don’t want it, I just won’t look at it,” said Coun. Wes Brodhead, who arrived at Monday’s meeting with his budget binders in a pull cart.
Coun. Cam MacKay had a similar opinion.
“The issues that come up are always different. Sometimes I’ll look at this and sometimes I’ll look at that,” he said.
Coun. Roger Lemieux said he had no problem with the documents as they are.
“The book was created for a reason,” he said. “We’re kind of reinventing the wheel.”
