Your annual investment in the City through your property taxes ensures Quesnel continues to be a vibrant and sustainable community. While Council and City staff have been highly successful in recent years in obtaining grants to stretch your tax dollars and increase the capital investments, especially amenities investments, we can make each year, the most dependable and consistent source of funding for these investments is the taxes and utility fees collected from each property owner.
It’s only your annual taxes and your utility fees that Council can depend on year over year to underwrite the building, rebuilding, and maintenance of the City’s infrastructure: water and sewer systems; storm drains; roads, sidewalks and trails; street lighting and crosswalks; City-owned buildings; parks and playgrounds; emergency services equipment; cemetery; airport; transit; mobile fleet and equipment; landfill; and continued investments in the West Quesnel dewatering and land movement monitoring systems.
Local governments own and are responsible for maintaining approximately 60% of the public infrastructure in Canada and in 2019 the Federation of Canadian Municipalities issued a report card which revealed that a large proportion of local government infrastructure is aged and in “poor” or “very poor” condition. The estimated “infrastructure deficit” for Canada (how much is needed to bring all government infrastructure up to good condition) in 2019 was $150 billion.
Local government’s reliance on property taxation for the bulk of their capital program (i.e. building and maintaining core infrastructure) has been partly responsible for the accrual of this massive deficit; property taxes and fees are a very limited source of funding relative to the size of the infrastructure that local governments must manage and maintain.
Federal and provincial infrastructure funding in recent years has been sparse and very difficult for local governments to access in any meaningful way. This is one of the main reasons that the Union of BC Municipalities and the BC Provincial Government have entered into a formal process to review local government financing and explore alternate ways to enable local governments to consistently maintain all their infrastructure while continuing to support quality programs and services (i.e. their operating budgets).
But, the failure of many local governments to annually charge appropriate taxes and fees to fund a long-term asset management strategy has been a big part of the problem too. Too many local government budgets remain “political” documents rather than budgets that reflect the true costs of managing and maintaining capital infrastructure while delivering quality services and programs. Too many elected Councils still fret about finding a tax amount that will be palatable to their voters rather than concerning themselves with the actual costs associated with maintaining the vibrancy and resiliency of the community that they serve.
Quesnel City Council’s capital budget is based on a long term asset management strategy, and the five year capital plan needed to maintain the City’s core infrastructure is fully funded through your taxes and fees, reserves that have been set aside through previous years taxation and fees, annual grants that we can depend on (like the federal gas tax fund), or grants that have already been approved (like the $8.8 million airport repaving grant, and the $2.5 million grant we received to renovate the #1 Firehall).
This year almost $21 million will be invested in your community through the City’s capital investment program: that’s real jobs, real spending on materials and supplies, and real benefits to our local economy. Your investment in your community through your taxes and fees is what makes Quesnel a great place to visit and to live and invest in.
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