Morinville residents will get a tax break in the mail this year now that town council has signed off on its 2014 budget.
Council voted unanimously in favour of third reading of its 2014 budget March 11.
Council trimmed an additional $81,716 in spending from the budget before the final vote, having previously cut a net $45,500 at second reading.
Council also voted to reduce the overall tax hike to 3.5 per cent from 4, trimming about $36,170 from the town's revenues.
Town chief financial officer Andy Isbister said in an interview Tuesday that he will know by next week how this cut will affect the average homeowner's tax bill.
Grants cut, bins bought
Council voted in favour of Coun. Stephen Dafoe's $9,500 cut to the community grants fund.
"We see over the past five years the same groups coming back year in and year out for funding," Dafoe said.
Shrinking the pool to $20,000 would challenge council to pick only the very best ones to back, he said.
Coun. Nicole Boutestein tried a second time to cut the $38,856 fire emergency lights item from the budget.
"We've never been given any information on it ever," she said.
The town should use its upcoming traffic safety study to determine if it needed these lights before it bought them, she argued.
The cut passed 6-1, with Coun. Brennan Fitzgerald opposed.
Coun. Rob Ladouceur lobbied for a $5,000 cut from council's budget to offset the cost of its three per cent pay raise. Council supported him 5-2 (Fitzgerald and Boutestein opposed).
Council also backed Ladouceur's move to eliminate a $7,000 grant to the Morinville Minstrels, with a note that the group would be encouraged to apply for a community initiatives grant.
And council supported Ladouceur's move to replace $20,000 worth of rebates for water efficient appliances with $10,000 worth of kitchen-catcher organic waste bins.
Those bins will be given away on a first-come, first-serve basis to town residents later this year as part of the town's new curbside organic waste program (expected to be approved at a future meeting).
Boutestein convinced council to drop the Morinville Food Bank's grant to $2,500 from $13,860, as that was what the group had received in the past.
She was also the one who suggested the 0.5 per cent tax cut.
Isbister advised against the cut, saying it would reduce the amount of cash going into the town's reserves.
"You would almost take the amount of cuts we've done today and wipe them right out," he said.
The cut itself works out to about $10 per household a year.
Council voted 4-3 in favour of the cut, with Ladouceur, Fitzgerald and Mayor Lisa Holmes opposed.
Community services challenged
Couns. Dafoe and Barry Turner made two aborted moves to take big chunks out of the community services budget.
Turner moved to hold the community services, community cultural centre and programming budgets at 2013 levels, which worked out to a cut of about $136,852 (as council had previously agreed to cut $9,500 in community grants from this area). He withdrew it in the face of opposition.
Dafoe called for a $40,000 cut, arguing that staff had underestimated the amount of cash they had saved by dropping 10 shows from this year's slate at the cultural centre.
Town chief administrative officer Debbie Oyarzun called this a "drastic" and possibly premature cut, and asked council to complete its organizational and efficiency review this year before bringing out the axe.
"You could be losing things you worked hard to put in place," she said.
After considerable debate and a brief in camera session on the issue, council voted down the proposal 4-3, with Dafoe, Boutestein and Turner in the minority.
No change in water/sewer
Council also passed its new water and sewer rates.
The rates are the same as they were last year, meaning residents will see no change in their water and sewer bills if they use the same amount of water as they did last year.
However, as the town is expecting overall water consumption to rise, most homeowners will end up paying about $0.58 more a month for water and sewer services ($88.67, compared to $88.09 last year).
