South Frontenac Council Accepts Draft Budget Without Change

Jeff Green | Dec 18, 2024

South Frontenac Council met for over four hours on Friday morning (December13) to hear service updates and spending plans from all of the township’s department heads for 2025, and into future years as well.

The draft budget document that they were considering included a 5.69% increase in the total levy to ratepayers in 2025 as compared to the levy in 2024. The township has also seen an increase in assessment of 1.23%, based on new construction coming into the tax rolls. Therefore what South Frontenac staff call the “taxpayer impact” of the draft budget is a 4.41% increase, and it is this figure that is used by Council when they look at the budget increase.

Chief Administrative Officer Louise Fragnito said that she had been anticipating a larger than normal budget increase this year, certainly compared to increases in the 2% to 3% range that staff have consistently brought to Council in recent years.

“We knew that we were facing increases this year in policing, staffing and other costs. We also are bringing in an extra 1% increase in the investment reserve this year, based on our long term financial plan. So, in order to ensure we have the resources we need for future years, we have a larger bump this year, but our plan is to set ourselves up to go back to the 2 to 3 per cent in future budgets,” she said.

Deputy Mayor Doug Morey asked if there was anything in reserve allocations that could bring the budget down to “say 3.77 per cent from the 4.41 per cent, to make it easier on constituents, knowing we will have to put more money into future years to make up for it.”

Louise Fragnito said the kind of process Morey was talking about had taken place, and she was concerned that any cuts to this budget would necessitate the same or greater increases in future years. She also said that “when you look around our region, our increase is still lower than most of the other municipalities at 4.41%, and we still have one of the lowest tax rates in the area.”

Morey's proposal did not have much traction with the rest of Council.

Mayor Vandewal said, “Council did not go to staff, at the beginning, saying we want a 2% increase, they didn't ask, but we did not tell them to do that. We went to staff and said bring us a budget that meets the needs of the people in South Frontenac, and that's what they brought back. And they deferred stuff that they could defer, they deferred an excavator, saying no, we can make do for now and get one later. So, to go ahead now and say let's get the budget to a number that we like, that's not fair. We could have done that 2 months ago, but not now.”

Councillors Sleeth, Roberts, Pegrum, and Ruttan all said they were comfortable with the budget document as it stands, and a motion to receive it and refer it to the meeting on Tuesday Night (December 17) as presented, was approved with no more debate.

At their meeting on December 17, Council formally adopted the 2025 budget.

The budget includes over $44 million in expenditures, of which $23,753,528 will come from local taxation, up from $22,474,274, an increase of $1.28 million, 5.69%.

The budget document summary page also includes a calculation of the taxpayer impact of the budget, which incorporates an increase in property assessment resulting from growth.

It says, “Based on average phase-in assessment, the township's share of the tax bill on a $278,126 property will increase 4.41% which equals $77.74”.

(Editor's note – The $278,126 average property value in South Frontenac, is based on numbers for property values from Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, valuations that have not been adjusted since 2016. It is not the average sale value of homes in South Frontenac over the past 12 – 24 months, which is considerably higher.)