Lower tax rates, more money for public safety proposed for next year's Fredericton budget - CBC

Next year's operating budget for the City of Fredericton will be back before council in a week for formal approval. (Silas Brown/CBC)Social SharingFredericton city councillors gave approval in principle Monday to an operating budget for next year that puts a focus on spending on police and public safety while also decreasing property tax rates.

“I want you to know that we were guided by two priorities that featured prominently in your discussions," Steven Hart, the chief administrative officer, told councillors. "One being affordability and the other being public safety."

The operating budget, along with the capital and water and sewer budgets, will return to regular council next Monday to be formally approved.

Under the spending plan, inside and outside property tax rates would decline in 2027, according to the presentation by city treasurer Alicia Keating.

Households facing the inside rate would see a rate reduction of 4.67 cents, to $1.2619, and those paying the outside rate would see a reduction of 0.77 cents, to $1.1988, she said.

City staff proposed four major service-level changes, and councillors approved nearly all of them unanimously.

The first, for the direct action response team of the Fredericton Police Force, will mean an increase of $1.14 million to add vehicles and staff. This unit has been deployed to curb public drug use and petty crime.

The budget approved in principle includes money to add staff and vehicles to the Fredericton Police Force's direct response unit. (CBC)

In the only point of division during the entire meeting, Deputy Mayor Ruth Breen expressed concern about the approach to public safety.

“What I do recall in many of the public safety public meetings that we have had over the last few years regarding this crisis is I often heard, 'We will not, we cannot police ourselves out of this crisis,'” Breen said.

“And yet every budget we seem to make these attempts to police ourselves out of this crisis."

The second increase, for $714,546, is for maintenance and staffing of city sports fields.

The last two increases were for expanding affordable or no-cost recreational programming, with an additional $101,354, and for affordable housing support, which gets an increase of $91,000.

Other policing changes under the budget include funding to staff a petty-crime unit, the community engagement unit, with uniformed officers. It has been made up of retired officers to free up regular officers. 

The city found just over $1 million in savings in police force spending. These were mostly attributed to one-time expenses incurred this past year for the Scott Report on the collapse of two murder cases and for expanding service to some amalgamated areas. 

Parking, transit and recreation rates would all see a slight increase this year.

Last year, the province implemented a property tax assessment freeze, which had left the city with less income than could have been expected from increases in property tax assessments.

That freeze is gone this budget season, but a new provincial process is moving municipalities away from using that number for tax rates anyway.

The new process, called the local rate stabilizer, gives municipalities a calculation to use during budget processes that creates a suggested tax rate increase based on adding inflation and how much the local populations grew. 

“What emerged is basically a system that encourages municipalities to determine what revenues are needed rather than what revenues would be available if tax rates stayed the same in an environment with rapidly increasing assessments,” Hart said. 

Keating said the city’s inflation costs were actually higher than what the province predicted, “because we were not able to increase our budgets accordingly for 2026” because of the freeze.

In order to meet the target rate from the province, city staff reviewed the budget line by line to find savings to offset new costs.

One area of reduction because of this is a decision to spend $500,000 less of the $3 million planned in 2027 for city funding toward the recently announced Fredericton Indoor Pool retrofit project.

This is not expected to impact the timeline for the project, Keating said, and is completely separate from the city’s recent decision to build a new pool at the Grant Harvey Centre.

Sam Farley is a Fredericton-based reporter at CBC New Brunswick. Originally from Boston, he is a journalism graduate of the University of King's College in Halifax. He can be reached at sam.farley@cbc.ca