The BCA was at the Beaconsfield Council Meeting on September 23, 2019.
We raised two questions to the mayor and counsellors :
1- Why raise city taxes when you have received 2 Millions $ of extra unbudgetted welcome tax per year for the past 5 year?

2- Snowmelter for 617,000$

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Question 1- WHY RAISE TAXES ?

How dare you to raise city taxes by up to 2% while the welcome tax money is pouring in ?
 

The Mayor announced in the June 2019 CONTACT that the city received 2 Millions $ of extra unbudgetted welcome tax per year for the past 5 year for a total of 10 Million $ in operation surplus.

 

This month, the Agglo announced that the residential evaluation will be raised by as much as 26%. Earlier today, Mr Mayor, added that Beaconsfield was hit the most by these raises. So he quickly wanted to reassure to the citizens by saying don't worry, " we will keep tax increases within inflation (2%)".

 

How can you raise taxes when your pockets are full ? Why not talk about giving us a break, even temporarily lowering taxes with that extra money ?

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• The mayor's first answer was to attack me saying "I don't know where you took your accounting courses ?". (I am not an accountant)

• Then he said there is a big need for the city for a lot of projects in the next few years that will require financing. So we will either finance it with our surpluses or by borrowing money. The projects we are thinking of are the infrastructures, we have people that want to have new pools, we have people that want to see parks and chalets improved, we have a lot of projects on the table. That 10 million $ will not even cover all those projects.

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MORE DEBT

 

So we added that for the same 5 years the city collected 10 Million $ in surpluses, the debt was raised from 12 to 16 Millions $. So the more the city collects, the more the city borrows. And when the welcome tax bonanza will end, we will be stuck with a very high level of debts.

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• The mayor answered that when the welcome tax slows down, we will be more that happy that we have built a cushion and we will have to raise taxes by 2% instead of 10+ % as can be seen at the city of Montreal or the Agglo level.

• The mayor concluded that he heard nothing but congratulations from citizens for the way we managed this situation.

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PRIORITIES

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I concluded that the usage of these surpluses is a matter of setting priority.

• Do we need 4 outdoor public pools to be renovated at a cost of 5 Millions $ each ?

• Do we need to move the library from where it is ?

• Where can we see the city's priorities when you no longer give the citizens access to the 3 years capital program ?

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Question 2 - ACQUIRING A SNOWMELTER FOR 617,000$

Item 20.1 Acquisition of a snowmelter at the cost of 617,263$ to the single conforming bidder.

 

Our questions were :
-Can we have access to the study which concluded that a snowmelter was required ?
-What are the expected savings ?
-What is the payback (period of time needed for the saving to recover for the costs) ?
-And we were surprized by the fact that, for the second month in a row, a major acquisition was made with a single bidder (in August a single bidder was found for a dump truck costing 250,000$).
 

The GM answers were :

• "when over 100,000$ we have to go to the public bidding system (SEAO) otherwise we go by invitation to get a few responses.

• The reason for this acquisition is that the city has no more option to dump our snow in neighbouring collaborating cities since they need more space for themselves, so we have to find a new solution.

• The pay back is that it is much cheaper than purchasing a property somewhere and investing on the site to make it satisfy the environment regulations.

• About savings, we do not expect much savings even if the operation will be equivalent or maybe cheaper than to haul the snow to a dumping site.​