Over the course of three segments, Rob and Tanya talk with Canmore Mayor John Borrowman about the Town’s financial situation and response to COVID-19.

 

Rob: Talking about the financial impacts COVID-19 has had on the Town of Canmore and some decisions that were made this week. What have the financial costs been to the town?

Mayor John Borrowman: Since this whole thing started, we closed the Rec Centre and Elevation Place right away, and those are big revenue producers. When you roll all of the various revenue streams that have been lost, and that includes reduced fine collections, it’s about $2.8 million in lost revenue. But that’s been balanced by financial savings, if you will. A large part of that was through salary and wages. Unfortunately, we had to lay off a large number of staff, about 40% of our workforce, most of which were associated with operating the facilities and a number of reductions across all departments. There are savings of about the same amount of $2.8 million. It’s sort of break even.

Tanya: That seems to be one of the reasons why council chose to go with reducing taxes to the 2019 levels.

John:  We brought the 2020 approved budget back, and some of the directions for administration to follow were we wanted to maintain essential services and had to keep business continuity going. We also had to budget in for other costs associated to responding to the pandemic. But one of the key directions was we wanted to find ways of reducing the 2020 tax requirement back to what it was 2019 and how we accomplished that was by canceling essentially various capital projects, reducing them in scope.

Some of the projects that will have been affected, and it doesn’t mean gone forever – the rehab project for Railway Avenue essentially from the railway crossing where there’s work happening now west along Railway Avenue, that was supposed to start planning this year, will be pushed off at least a year. The Town Centre Enhancement plan has been affected, which was a bit disappointing because we’ve been kicking that one down the road for about 15 years. There were some projects that were largely completed that we’ve just canceled. Things like an affordable housing and land policies project that started years ago, which is largely accomplished, and all that was left there was that study that’s meant to be done on the Silvertip wildlife corridor. There were pieces of that Land Use Bylaw update and a visitor accommodation review, they’ll be pushed off. But that actually allows time to have a broader conversation starting this year on our tourism economy, and we’re planning a broad community conversation around tourism and getting better social license for that economy in our town. Then there was a light fleet replacement project that was pushed off and that was for three vehicle replacements. The last project that was removed from this year’s project list was the Roundhouse solar system. So there were three different buildings in the queue this year for solar panels on the roof. Two of them will continue. The Roundhouse, that’s the daycare building by the Lawrence Grassi school. Council was careful about affecting any projects that address our climate action goals or human wildlife conflict. Those are the projects that have been removed from the capital budget, which resulted in a $1.2 million savings. That’s the equivalent of the tax requirement that changed from 2019 to 2020.

 

Rob: With a lot of these budgetary changes that have been made here this week comes some reductions in service levels and and things that we might be used to happening around town.

John: Of course, all recreation programs have been closed since the facilities closed. We’ve canceled community event grants. In fact, we’ve canceled all 2020 events except for the New Year’s Eve party, and the town is planning some virtual Canada Day events. There’s reduced service levels across the Parks department, including the downtown flower program. We’ve eliminated staff professional development, travel, hosting and conferences. We’ve eliminated all of our corporate events, including the Christmas party and staff appreciation evening and those sorts of things. So everything that isn’t felt to be really essential, it’s been cut. Through those reductions in some of the other things I’ve already detailed we have cut about $2.8 million.

Rob: The big challenge with COVID-19 as well is how fluid it is and how unpredictable it is. I think there was some expectation that maybe by July we’d be able to have, say, Elevation Place reopened again, and that’s clearly not going to happen.

John: In April when we first directed admin to start doing this work, council identified the medium term scenario as what we were planning for. Medium term is that things return to more or less normal by the end of July. In April, that seemed realistic. Now, it’s not. When we get past that, that’s when the tax stabilization reserve will really come in handy because we’re going to have continued expenses and we won’t be seeing our revenues increased very much for…who knows.

 

Rob: We discussed how the Town of Canmore is hopefully going to be helping people out by keeping taxation rates at 2019 levels. What more is the Town of Canmore looking at as far as response plan for both residents and for businesses?

John: Both the social development team under FCSS and the economic development team have developed programs that were meant to be approved at council but ended up postponing to next Tuesday. So proposed COVID related spending, which would all come from the tax stabilization reserve – about $350,000 or so for the social development and pandemic response. About $280,000 to the economic development for recovery and support. There’s a number of specific plans and programs that people can have a look at. They are on the town website and we will be discussing next Tuesday at council. They’re designed specifically to help people that are struggling with reduced finances and businesses as well.

Tanya: My understanding as well, there be a motion of council possibly to establish an economic recovery task.

John: Council will be appointing one or two councilors to that and the rest of the task force is expected to be filled out by representatives from the various sectors through the Canmore  Businesses Alliance and the established business groups like the Chamber and the Downtown Business Association. They’ll bring recommendations back ultimately to council and also to inform their own business organizations how to move forward.

Tanya: There’s also $4 million in the tax stabilization reserve, and what’s being proposed to be spent this year is around $1 million. $300,000 as well for additional COVID related expenses. That’s that cleaning supply and PPE piece.

John: There was another motion brought to council by Councilor Sanford to put into the approved spending the reopening of the public washrooms and our parks. It’s a big job under COVID restrictions. The staff have to get fully covered in gear and a lot of the work involves steam pressure cleaning. Depending on the location and other considerations, it can be up to four times a day. The total cost for starting that up again was $170,000, also being funded from the attack stabilization reserve.

It’s good to know that years ago, before I was the mayor, council created this tax stabilization reserve exactly for situations like this that were unusual and couldn’t be planned for, and we have built that reserve up to $4 million. Thank goodness because that reserve is really kicking in in a meaningful way. If we hadn’t built that reserve, it would have been much more difficult to address many of these needs. So kudos to previous councilors and Mayor Casey who was running the ship at that time. It’s a great tool to have at our disposal.

Filed under: Canmore, covid-19, Mayor John Borrowman, Mountain Insider