Mayor presents last minute improvements to proposed budget, but not 418X

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Money was found at the last minute to address several complaints about the rate hike and missing projects in the proposed 2022 budget, Mayor Drew Dilkens said Friday.

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A combination of several recently revised projections, the largest of which is $ 270,000 in funding announced by the Ontario government for children’s services that city taxpayers will now not have to assume, has added $ 532,582 in additional revenue for next year. . So the mayor and city officials recommend using that extra money to respond to the criticism they’ve heard since the proposed budget was cut on November 19.

“The proposal is to address some of the things that we heard through public consultations over the past month: meetings with councilors, phone calls, meetings with high school students, meetings with the Serbian Club, meetings with everyone, and the things that have happened. he reported very well through the media, ”Dilkens said.

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That means the budget proposal to save $ 24,000 annually by charging a $ 20 per visit fee for a rat extermination service that is now free has been scrapped. A proposal to double the tunnel bus fare from $ 5 to raise an additional $ 670,000 annually will now increase to just $ 7.50 in 2022, though it will end at $ 10 in 2023. Complaints that the city’s Active Transportation Master Plan will spin your wheels until activated A transportation engineer is hired and resident requests to reduce traffic take years to process will be addressed with the hiring of a new engineer to oversee both issues at a cost of $ 110,872 annually.

City officials also urged adding $ 202,000 to a contingency account to help address the continuing financial challenges of the COVID pandemic, as well as hiring a coordinator (costing $ 120,442) dedicated to searching and managing. desperately needed grants to build affordable housing. And $ 74,653 is recommended to reroute the Central 3 bus to pass through the new Lancer Center. This is a response to criticism that the controversial plan by the city of Windsor to shut down the popular Adie Knox group and switch programs to the soon-to-open Lancer Center group had an obvious problem: There was no bus service.

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Missing from the list of budget additions is the 418X, a new east-west express route along Tecumseh Road that serves the University of Windsor and is seen as a linchpin of Transit Windsor’s new master plan to double service and number of passengers in the coming years. Some of the more progressive councilors have been calling for the 418X to be launched in 2022 to improve service levels that rank last among similar-sized bus services in Ontario.

But Dilkens said Friday that despite the additional $ 532,582 available for the budget, 2022 is not the time for the 418X. Transit Windsor passenger numbers are down 50 percent due to the pandemic, the six new buses that the 418X would require will simply not be available in 2022 due to a national shortage, and it would cost $ 1 million a year to operate the 418X, he said. .

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“It’s not a bad idea, we all put our hands up in support of (the master plan). It’s the wrong year to do it.”

Budget deliberations, which often take a dozen or more hours, are scheduled for Monday. Another piece of good news is that city-supported agencies, boards, and commissions are going to need $ 544,000 less than originally budgeted. That means the proposed tax increase has been reduced from 1.99 to 1.86 percent.

“In fact, we are in an even better situation for taxpayers,” said the mayor. “We are providing a lower proposed tax increase from where we started and can still resolve some of the issues raised by the community in the consultation period.”

He said he expects there will be some councilors who want additions (particularly the 418X) that will raise the increase above two percent, while other councilors will want a zero increase. But he believes that most will stay in the middle.

“I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with a 1.86 percent budget, I think that’s where most of the council will be concentrated.”

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