Council has moved forward a 2023 budget with a four-and-a-half per cent increase to Jasper’s tax requisition.

The budget adds new resources to address council’s stated priority of increasing internal capacity to advance housing in Jasper. If approved, the budget would also bring online a position to increase community engagement; go after external grants and funds to augment community development work; and improve Indigenous relationships. 

Councillor Wendy Hall made the motion to use $150,000 of a special reserve (adding to the $250K already earmarked by administration), put aside to help ease the economic pains of recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, to do just that. Council had initially budgeted for a bigger dip into the “financial stabilization fund” but most were compelled to spread the relief reserve over a longer period. 

Councillor Ralph Melnyk spoke in favour of the budget and called it “a good balance of what we can go to the community with.” He was comfortable asking residents whose homes are assessed at $900,000 to pay an extra $104 in taxes. Commercial rate-payers would have to swallow an approximate $2,400 increase in their taxes, he calculated (update: a commercial property valued at $5 million would see an increase of $2,913 in taxes).

“I believe this will be a transition year, I would hate to see us cut these positions…bearing in mind where they are trying to get us in 2024,” Melnyk said.

Councillor Helen Kelleher-Empey was also on board with advancing a budget which included the proposed new positions. 

“I know it’s a lot of money, it’s hard to swallow [but] I totally support this housing position,” she said. “It’s moving the big picture forward. Isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for for 20 years?”

She suggested if town coffers were going to suffer in future budgets which weren’t cushioned by a stability reserve, the first place she’d consider raising revenues is through alterations to Jasper’s paid parking program.

“That’s why we brought it in, it’s to the benefit of all of our residents,” she reminded council.

A FTE planning and development manager with a salary of $151,000 did not make the cut; however, half of the budgeted amount did. Council agreed the work to prepare the municipality for the eventual transition of land use and planning authority from Parks Canada would be better contracted out, at this stage. As such, they passed a $75,000 line item, although councillor Rico Damota voted against the motion.

Damota voted a lone “nay” on two other motions, as well, including the penultimate motion of the seven hour session: the one which moved the 2023 operational budget, with its $1.08 million increase over the 2022 tax requisition, from discussion at Committee of the Whole to consideration at the council level. Damota indicated he would have preferred a larger cushion from the Financial Stability Fund to justify including the housing coordinator and fund development positions, and he said he wanted more debate on the other proposed positions. 

“To me it’s more about optics,” he said.

To make his point that the budget should be more austere, he then moved that a $10,000 reserve for maintaining Jasper’s relationship with its Japanese sister-city, Hakone, be scrubbed.

“Sometimes you’ve got to make tough calls,” he said.

Councillors Kelleher-Empey and Melnyk spoke against Damota’s motion.

“It’ll make a difference of $2.40 [to homeowners],” Melnyk said. 

Damota’s Hakone motion was defeated, 5 to 1, before the 2023 amended operational budget was passed by the same ratio.

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com