Peterborough Currents

Last week, Peterborough city councillors sat as the finance committee to review each page of the 2021 draft municipal budget highlights book. This year, it was three evenings of deliberations and discussion, which gave councillors an opportunity to ask questions about city operations and propose amendments to the draft budget put forward by staff.

Co-publishers Ayesha Barmania and Will Pearson have collected the highlights from each meeting so you can hear what happened.

To hear the highlights from Monday’s meeting about the City’s corporate and legislative department, skip to minute 2:15; for the highlights of the infrastructure and planning department from Tuesday’s meeting, skip to minute 9:30; and for the highlights on the community services department from Wednesday, skip to minute 19:05.

The 2021 budget will be voted to be approved on December 14 at a city council meeting, and things in the draft documents may change between now and then. Citizens can review the documents, communicate with their city councillors and register to speak at the city council meeting. To learn more click here.

And if you have any questions about the municipal budget, you can also ask us!

Episode transcript coming soon.

For our fourth episode of the Budget Week podcast, Peterborough Currents called up Michael Papadacos, head of the City’s infrastructure management division to talk about how the City approaches climate change action.

The interview in this episode is an edited version of our conversation; to listen to the unedited version click here. Read an article rounding up climate change projects in the budget by clicking here.

Hello you’re listening to Peterborough Currents. I’m Ayesha Barmania. This is episode four of our series on the 2021 municipal budget. And in this episode, I’m diving into how climate change gets addressed in City operations.

In December 2016, City Council voted to adopt the Greater Peterborough Climate Change Action Plan. It’s a plan that sets out the path towards achieving 2 overarching goals:

The first is called climate change mitigation. And this means reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the city by 30%. That’s for both the community living and working here as well as for the Corporation of the City of Peterborough’s operations.

The second goal is called climate change adaptation, and that’s preparing the city for the impacts of climate change – like extreme weather events

Much of the responsibility for implementing this plan falls to the infrastructure management division, since adaptation and mitigation to climate change often means rethinking what our infrastructure is capable of handling. From moving car traffic through the city more quickly to reduce idling emissions … to preparing our stormwater system for more significant rainfall, that all falls under infrastructure.

So to learn more, I spoke with Michael Papadacos. He is the head of infrastructure management at the City. And he began by telling me about how the plan came out of a partnership program with other municipalities across the country.

So the climate change action plan is, you know, an overarching document that pulls together the first three milestones of the Partners for Climate Protection. So this is a program that’s managed and delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and ICLEI Canada. The intention is to help Canadian municipalities take climate action. So it’s a five milestone process. And the first three milestones are what are contained within that climate change action plan. So it’s sort of a first creation of a baseline of the emissions inventory. Second, setting a mission reduction target. And then third, developing a local action plan to achieve that target.

What are the fourth and fifth milestones that are missing there?

Yeah, the fourth or fifth milestones are monitoring progress, and implementation and ongoing implementation.

How come? How come those aren’t included in the plan?

Because the plan was developed in 2016. And so those milestones four and five are the kind of ongoing work. And we actually have a draft report that we’re in the final stages of updating, so we’re going to submit that report to FCM, and close out completion of that sort of program.

And okay, so can you make it a bit concrete? Like how do these goals and targets and the principles laid out in the plan? How do those get utilized in your division?

Well, so the plan lays out a series of strategies for climate action. And it’s grouped into six themes, you know, homes, workplaces and schools, on the move, food, land and people. And then it also is broken down into sort of two sector views, right. So there’s the corporate sector. So that applies to the emissions that are created from the city of Peterborough and municipal operations and any properties that are owned by the city to deliver services for the community, and then the other part of it is the community sector. So that’s the emissions created by the residents and businesses of the city.

And so those strategies have a series of sort of actions or recommendations that are, you know, incorporated into not just my division, but you know, divisions across the corporation, because really, it has to be, you know, embedded across the corporation. And, and I guess it’s the document that kind of, confirms and demonstrates the city and the community’s commitment to climate action in those different sort of thematic areas.

And so the plan kind of lays out different suggestions and actions. And then, you know, a portion of those are directed at the corporate reduction. So those are the 5% of the total emissions in the city of Peterborough are from the City of Peterborough, the municipalities actions, and then the 95% come from the community at large. So there’s, they’re broken down into targeting, you know, things that are more operational for city staff to implement them. The other ones are more, you know, areas that the community would need to lead or the city could potentially influence or maybe facilitate community action in that regard.

Okay, and what monitoring do we do – like how do we know if we’re on track?

We do a review of the inventory, more or less and reproduce the greenhouse gas inventory that was developed as part of that plan. So that plan, when it was first completed, did a set of baseline of the year 2011. And through, you know, some assumptions and modeling and calculations and data analysis, kind of put together a greenhouse gas emission total in 2011. And then, what we’ve done now in this draft report that we’re working on getting completed is the update, right? So we kind of have done a check against that and looked at how things are going.

So once that report is done we’ll know for like the past 10 years, I guess, how we’ve been doing?

Yes, yeah, that’s right.

Okay. So and correct me if I’m wrong here. But as I understand it, there’s another part of the plan that’s about adapting. I think there’s also an element of adapting our infrastructure and being ready for climate change events. I wondered if you could speak to what sort of events Peterborough is vulnerable to? And can you give me an example of what climate change adaptation looks like?

Yeah, sure. So the two biggest ones are in terms of climate impacts, and the things that we’re at risk for here in Peterborough, and it’s common for many municipalities, but it’s flooding and the impact of significant weather events; and then the other one is increased number of extreme heat days would be the would be the other sort of main impact that we are looking to kind of adapt to.

So in terms of like, what adaptation looks like, you know, this is actually something where, you know, the city of Peterborough is maybe a little bit ahead of the curve, because of our experience with the flood in 2004. Right. So that flood, while it wasn’t centered at a time where a lot of people were thinking about climate change and adapting to climate change, it did illustrate for the residents of the city that we’re vulnerable to this type of an event and in a significant way. So the the city kind of over the, you know, 5-10 years that followed, put a lot of effort into developing flood reduction master plans, that took a look at sort of the overall city and suggested a series of programs to, you know, improve the state of the existing infrastructure, as well as looking how to study and recommend further improvements into the future.

You know, one of the biggest ones and sort of the centerpiece of that flood reduction masterplan is the central area flood reduction project, right. So that’s the Jackson Creek diversion channel, right, that’s going to protect a large portion of the downtown core from the impacts of the 100 year flood event. So that’s an example of climate change action, adaptation and action.

You know, actually, we had a really good example, earlier this year. Back in January, we had a significant rain event that actually caused a little bit of localized flooding in East city right along Curtis Creek, I think there were about three or four properties that were impacted where the creek spilled. And it’s at that time, we were in the process of finishing a project there, where we were expanding the size of the culverts that go under all the roads there in East City to increase the hydraulic capacity of that Creek during a significant rainfall event. And, you know, we were literally a few months away from finishing the outlet. And if we’d have had that outlet finished, there’s a good chance that there would have been no properties impacted. If we hadn’t done the culvert work and made those adaptive projects and implemented them, we probably would have actually dozens and another significant flood event on our hands. So I guess that’s a great example of adaptation and action is understanding that, you know, regardless of what happens the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, we’re going to see more of these events of higher duration, frequency and intensity. And so, you know, we need to do our part to identify where those risks are, and make, you know, the strategic investments to reduce the risks to the residents of the city.

Hmm, it’s an interesting thing to invest in, because if the investments are happening, and the work is going ahead properly, we’re not going to have these extreme problems where everyone calls for action. So it has to kind of happen in the background.

Well, it’s you know, there’s an adage in the infrastructure world, right, which is: if you’re not boring, you’re not doing your job. Right. And I think there was a great John Oliver sketch of all things where he tried to make infrastructure exciting. But if infrastructure is being planned, built and managed properly, then, you know, the hope is that most people don’t know that’s going on, and they can go on with the other elements of their life.

Sure. And I think we can see in a lot of the infrastructure capital projects in this year’s budget, most of them have a yes or no, or just a yes (I don’t think the noes are included) for climate mitigation or climate adaptation or both. Can you just walk me through a little bit of what makes the criteria for both climate mitigation and climate adaptation?

Sure. So climate mitigation, I think you’d mentioned it earlier, that’s any kind of action that reduces a contributing factor to climate change. So that would be reducing primarily anything that creates greenhouse gases, right. So if it’s the heating of buildings, or the powering of, of buildings, or the fuel used in our fleet, things of that nature, right. So any type of a project where completion of the project will result in a, you know, quantifiable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, that would qualify it as a climate mitigation type project. A climate adaptation project, on the other hand, would be something that helps to build some resilience into the city with respect to, you know, some climate change impacts. So primarily, Is it some kind of a flood reduction measure or improvement? Or is it some kind of a project that might help in the event of more extreme heat days?

I see, so it’s about meeting these specific targets of reducing emissions fossil fuel use, and I think the other one was energy consumption? It doesn’t include things like environmental stewardship, that’s just a totally different portfolio. Is that right?

Well, I guess you know, environmental stewardship, depending on what element you’re looking at, will have components of one or the other or possibly both. Right? So, for instance, you know, investments that we make in our emerald ash borer program, right. So the emerald ash borer is an invasive species that is killing all ash trees in the city, we’ve invested money to strategically save as many of the ash trees that we can, that are in primarily, you know, street tree scenarios. And so that would be an example of a stewardship type of an initiative, right, trying to protect and save these trees that are at risk. You know, they’re at risk, partially because of, it’s an adaptation, it’s a response, right? We’re having to respond in this way. Because, you know, the ash borer is an invasive species and its growth, in some respects and spread has is accelerated by climate change. And so that would be an example of where, you know, preserving, preserving those would be some, both an adaptation action, because we’re adapting to this impact, but then also, because trees, store carbon, they help, you know, reduce, reduce, you know, air pollution, local air pollution, and some of the impacts of that would be a mitigation impact as well. And then also the shade, right, trees provide shade, so that helps reduce heat island effects. So it’s also that adaptation on the extreme heat side of things as well.

Sure, it seems like an interesting lens to analyze these different projects as well, I guess on the other hand, and one project that kind of caught my eye in the budget was, and it’s not seeing any money till 2023. But that’s the development of the Parkway into a high use road serving the north end of the city. That is labeled in the budget as a climate mitigation project. So I guess that’s just the kind of flipside reverse example of not necessarily being environmental stewardship.

Yeah, you know, a project that is underway right now is a pilot to improve the optimization and synchronization of our traffic signals, right. So, traffic congestion is a contributor to mitigation, or is a contributor to climate change in greenhouse gas emissions. So that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s a possibly an example of where, you know, a mitigation. It would reduce traffic. But again, you know, to your point, there’s probably some, you know, the devils in the details.

Sure. Um, one thing I noticed in the capital budget, there’s a line item for sustainability projects. And you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t is that new to the budget this year? And could you speak to what those are?

Not the sustainability projects, that has been in the budget for a few years, it predates my time at the city. So I can’t speak to exactly when it would have come into the budget. But the intention for that, for that bucket of money is for getting city funds in place primarily so we can access funding opportunities, you know, when there’s funding opportunities, most of the time, it’s not just free money, right, it’s usually say 50%, or up to some percentage. So we do have to have some skin in the game as a municipality. So what that budget provides is for us to be able to undertake those types of projects.

That line item in the budget is primarily for things that are hard built assets. So an example of what we’ve earmarked some of that money for, you know, we’ve made an application to the Natural Resources Canada, who’s will fund up to 50% of electric vehicle charging infrastructure for employers, right, to allow for them to consider electric vehicles as part of their fleet. So we have an application into NRCan to get 50% of the funding, so we can install dual charging stations at various city facilities.

So that way, you know, that takes takes away sort of that chicken and egg conundrum sometimes where, you know, a manager may want to consider when we’re looking at replacing a vehicle in the fleet, you know, it might be a light duty vehicle, or there might be a suitable electric vehicle that we could consider, you know, without the charging infrastructure, right, that’s a harder choice to make. So by doing this, right, we can leverage some municipal money into funding from another level of government. We are looking to build that infrastructure, it will be city owned infrastructure on city properties around the city. So that way, we could look at, at fleet considerations or electric vehicle considerations. facility.

So we looked at, you know, I think we proposed some additional – because you know, there’s some charger chargers that the King Street parking garage, we’ve proposed some additional charges, but those would be dedicated then for parking vehicles, parking enforcement vehicles, or parking division vehicles. We’ve looked at public works yard, having a couple installed there. Same with the wastewater treatment plant, and then another one, I think, at the, at the transit yard. So those are so the idea is to have those they’d be owned by the city, we would then have them at our facilities, and then we can use them for charging and electric vehicles that we procure in the coming years.

I see. So this comes first, and then it opens up the possibility of moving to electric or partially electric fleet for various departments.

Right, yeah, exactly.

Um, great. Well, okay, so I just want to – we’re running out of time and I have two questions left, if you have another couple minutes? So late last year, Mayor and Council voted to declare a climate change emergency. I wondered if you could just speak to how that impacted progress on the climate change action plan and your work, if at all?

Sure, so. So I guess the emergency climate change emergency declaration provided additional sort of priority, part of a priority and focus, as seen in the budgeting, and you know, it’s integrated across all city departments and divisions. You know, I think the one probably one of the biggest things that it did is it prompted council to make additional dedicated funding commitments through last year’s budget where they created a climate change reserve. That has been continued in this year’s draft budget, or recommended in this year’s draft budget, and then those funds are helping to kind of fund some of these other some of these projects as well. So I think that, you know, I think that it provided an opportunity to focus counsel in providing some resources to be able to advance that.

Okay, I think, yeah, sorry. I think I confused sustainability projects and the new climate change fund as the new thing in this budget. I don’t think I saw any, I guess with withdrawals or any projects being financed through the reserve fund, is that right?

So yeah, when the reserve was established as part of the 2020 budget process. We brought a report forward in March of this year, I made some recommendations on how to suggest spending that or to bring forward a report to how we would spend some of that as well as making a couple recommendations. That was literally right when the onset of the pandemic happened and so council just said pause on allocating those monies until we have a better sense on where things stand. Okay, so the money is there. It’s earmarked for this. They just asked us not to spend much of it. So what we did over the course of this year was we, you know, we we found other ways that we could advance projects, you know, with existing funding or, you know, again looking towards, you know, where is it that we can leverage outside outside monies or funding to be able to advance some of the objectives that are contained within there. And then if you look in this year’s budget, some of these projects are being funded through the climate change reserve.

Okay, gotcha. Well, thanks so much for taking us through this today. I really appreciate your time, Michael.

No problem, Ayesha, thank you for the questions.

That was Michael Papadacos, head of the infrastructure management division at the City of Peterborough. We ran out of time towards the end before we could get to specific budget lines that are drafted to receive funding from the Climate Change Action Plan Reserve Fund, so I followed up by email and here’s what I found out.

In the draft 2021 budget there is a specific line item for implementing the Climate Change Action Plan which has a total of $1.5 million over the next 10 years and $150,000 for spending in 2021. This budget item is for seed funding climate change projects in the community.

In a separate budget line, there’s also half a million dollars over the next 10 years set towards Sustainability Projects for the city’s corporate services – which includes the electric vehicle charging stations that Michael spoke about. In 2021 that spending is drafted at $65,000.

Also the operating budget proposes to convert the Climate Change coordinator position from a contract to a full-time job.

And the last budget line drawing funds from the climate change action reserve is the $250,000 drafted to be spent in 2021 on the alternative fuel study for Peterborough Transit, which would look at the implications of transitioning the bus fleet off of fossil fuels.

That’s all the spending that draws specifically from the climate change reserve fund that Michael was speaking about towards the end of our interview. But there’s also other investments being made towards the Climate Action Plan’s goals.

Michael wrote that, “You can think of the Climate Change Reserve as bonus funding on top of a host of investments in climate action that are already being made. “

He notes that other initiatives like the Source Separated Organics Program, the conversion of decorative streetlights to LED, the watershed plan and many others contribute towards the climate action plan and are spread out across the budget.

I know that’s a lot of information – I’ve also prepared a write-up of this info on our website with some additional details, since it might be easier to digest by reading about it.

That’s all for Peterborough Currents today, thanks so much for listening. Music in this episode comes courtesy of the Mayhemingways. My name is Ayesha Barmania. City council is deliberating on the budget this week, and our next episode will bring you some of the highlights of those meetings. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.

For our third episode of the Budget Week podcast, Peterborough Currents co-publishers Ayesha Barmania and Will Pearson dive into the proposed changes to the budget for the City’s Social Services Division.

Read an article write-up of the changes to the division by clicking here.

Hello, you’re listening to Peterborough Currents. I’m Ayesha Barmania.

This is episode three of the Budget Week podcast, and today we’re going to dive into what’s been proposed for the 2021 Social Services Division budget.

And to tell us about it, I’m bringing in my colleague and co-publisher, Will Pearson. Hi Will.

Hello.

So Will, can you just walk me through — why are we taking a look at the Social Services Division in particular? Like, why does this interest you?

There’s a few reasons. I think that followers of Peterborough Currents know that both you and I have a particular interest in tracing how government decisions impact people who have the least resources and have the least opportunity. And I think that the social services division does that in particular. I think that people who live on a low income have perhaps the most to gain from decisions that get made during budget week, and also the most to lose. So I think it’s important to keep an eye on it for that reason. It’s also just a very big division within the City. With projected expenditures of $85 million next year, that’s the biggest division that is in the city. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the city it’s the biggest sort of drain on the city’s own finances, because a lot of the money for social services does come from the province. But still, it’s certainly by far the biggest division. And, you know, when the city did its budget consultations this year, they did a survey and asked folks what their top priorities were, and social services was the number two priority after housing. So citizens care about this as well.

Yeah, absolutely. You talk a bit about how big it is. What falls within the scope of social services?

Yeah, there’s three main sort of sub-programs. The first one is social assistance, so administering Ontario Works. Children’s services. And then housing and homelessness is also within the Social Services Division.

So when you’re looking at the, when you’re looking at the division’s budget, what are you seeing changing this year? What are the most important things that stand out?

There’s a few. So this is coming from my own read on the budget. But also I called Ellen Armstrong, who’s the division manager of social services to get her take on it as well. And she highlighted a couple different things. The first one is revenue reductions from the province. So there’s a couple key areas where the province is reducing funding, and that’s putting pressure on the budget in this division this year. Continued pressure on the homelessness system, there’s a lot of need for shelter in Peterborough. And I think that the people that are accessing shelter are showing more complex needs, especially during the pandemic, and that’s driving expenses up. And then yeah, and as a result of that, there’s a couple of places where cuts are being proposed by city staff in the draft budget this year, which we can talk about a little later.

Yeah, absolutely. And so you mentioned the kind of revenue reductions from the province. In the midst of all this COVID stuff, there have been some major transformations announced for the Peterborough area in particular. I wonder if you could get into how the province funding is changing on things like employment services?

Sure, yeah. So this actually dates back to before COVID-19. But the province is trying to do a pretty big overhaul of how it delivers employment services to people who are on social assistance. And they are kind of piloting that in the Peterborough region before they roll it out across the rest of the province. And so what that involves is– Under the old model, which is still in operation in most of the province, municipalities deliver employment services to people on social assistance. So that’s things like–

That’s Ontario Works, right?

Yeah. So things like I guess, you know, help with your resume help getting connected to appropriate jobs help, you know, finding the training that you might need to access the labor market so that you can get off social assistance and get into employment. So municipalities used to deliver that, and under the new model, that will be open to a competitive process, and any organization can bid to deliver those services. And while the city of Peterborough and a couple of neighboring municipalities did apply to continue delivering those services, Fleming College was chosen as the operator so we’re kind of in the midst right now of making that transition. And the city has received a pretty significant budget cut, because they’ll no longer be delivering that service. The province is cutting $1.6 million from the city’s budget. Most of that gets recouped by layoffs, because the city will be laying off people that used to deliver those services. But that doesn’t quite cover it; there’s still about $100,000 left over that the city will be on the hook for.

Right so the city is no longer providing the employment services that are part of the Ontario Works program, but there’s — what are they continuing to operate?

So they would still, you know, administer the benefits that people receive through social assistance. And then they also will continue to provide life — what’s called life stabilization supports. And so, as you can imagine, not everyone who’s on social assistance is ready to go get a job and is ready to access the labor market. Either because they have mental health challenges or addictions or maybe they don’t have housing. And for those individuals, it doesn’t, you know, they need to, they need help with those kinds of challenges before they can access the labor market, and so municipalities will continue to deliver addiction services, homelessness services, mental health referrals, but they’ll no longer be involved in really connecting people to the labor market once they’re ready.

Okay. And that’ll be that’s an interesting conversation to dig into more at a later time. But how we can kind of see this in the budget is we can see the Ontario Works Administration and Employment Services line. It’s being reduced by about 13%. If I’m reading this, right, and

The expenditures are being reduced by about 13%. Yeah, if you look at the provincial revenues are decreasing by 22%. And that’s the $1.6 million cut. But what you referred to is the expenditures, which is only decreasing by $1.5 million, and that’s so

The city’s making that up?

Yeah, so the city’s getting $1.6 million dollars less from the province, they’re only spending $1.5 million less. And so there’s $100,000, that is contributing to these budget pressures that Armstrong was discussing with me.

Gotcha. So to kind of move out of social assistance for a second, there’s also been some changes to Children’s Services Administration. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So there’s a couple changes coming down the line from the province in how particularly the administration of Children’s Services gets funded. Previously, the province funded 100% of administration costs for delivering children’s services. And starting in 2021, the province will only fund 50% of those costs. And so the city has to come up with that 50%, the County contributes a little bit to this as well. So the County is going to be upping its contribution to these expenses. But at the end of the day, this is actually another example of– it works out to about $100,000, again, that the city is going to have to find additional dollars to cover those expenses.

Mm hmm. Yeah. And you’d mentioned that Ellen Armstrong said that this was a tough budget year, in particular, because of these provincial funding changes. What are some of the service cuts that have been proposed for 2021?

There’s two main service cuts that are being proposed in social services. The first one is a change to discretionary benefits. So there’s a proposed cut to the recreation benefit that people on social assistance receive. And then the other cut is to a program called poverty reduction initiatives. And that is proposed to be cut by 50%.

So just to talk about the first one first: discretionary benefits, what are those?

So there’s two kinds of benefits that people on social assistance receive mandatory and discretionary. Mandatory benefits are just what they sound like: the municipality has to provide them. And those are you know what people usually associate with social assistance, which is a shelter allowance, so money to help you pay for your housing, and basic living allowance, so money for food. Mandatory benefits also include some prescription drugs, eye exams, and mandatory benefits are 100% funded by the province, and so that doesn’t have an impact on the municipal budget. There are other benefits that municipalities can decide to offer to their social assistance clients. And if they do provide them, the province only funds them up to a maximum of $10 per case per month. And currently, Peterborough provides about $15 per case per month in discretionary benefits. And so that extra $5 is paid by the city.

I see. So what kind of falls under discretionary benefits, what are we talking about?

So discretionary benefits are also health benefits. At the public meeting for public delegations on Monday night, a couple of people spoke that were concerned about discretionary benefits. One of them was Joanne Bazak-Brokking.

Discretionary benefits are only called discretionary because it requires a worker to make a decision. They cover health items such as eyeglasses, dentures and emergency dental care and hearing aids. Discretionary benefits also cover subsidized bus passes and contribute to basic funeral expenses. Budget 2021 will remove $142,568 from the discretionary benefit budget, that’s on page 171. This policy change will significantly reduce the capacity to meet essential health needs for people already hit very hard by COVID-19.

So this the city spends about $700,000 on its contribution to providing discretionary benefits and city staff in the draft budget of proposing a cut to that and the benefit in particular that they’re planning on, or proposing to cut is the recreation benefit. And this provided and continues to provide today I guess, up to $200 per child per year to families to help those kids access recreation activities and social activities.

Okay, and that’s being wiped out completely? Or will there still be access to recreation services?

So about 1500 children accessed this benefit in 2019, I should say. And, yes, to your question, the city is trying to mitigate the impact of this cut in one key way, Armtrong explains to me and that’s — the recreation department, which is outside of social services, has its own subsidies for people who are on low income. And starting next year, the plan is to broaden the eligibility for those subsidies to include people that are on social assistance. And so someone who is losing access to this benefit will be able to go to a city run recreation facility and access this subsidy. So that’s one way that they’re kind of mitigating that impact and the budget for the recreation department is being increased by $75,000, to anticipate that demand that there might be more people coming, that are losing access to that benefit. I should say, though, that the amount that the recreation benefit for people on social assistance is being cut is more than $75,000. So while the city is trying to mitigate the impact of this, you know, still amounts to a service reduction, it still amounts to a cut.

Okay. But it’s part of this larger pot of money that also includes health benefits, right?

Mm hmm. And the city — one of the reasons why I spoke to Ellen Armstrong about this, and she pointed out that one of the reasons why, or an additional thing that’s happening this year is the city really wants to prioritize health benefits in its discretionary benefits. When the discretionary benefit program was reviewed, the division noticed that the amount of money that they were providing folks to access you know, dental care or dentures just wasn’t enough to cover the actual costs of dentist work right now. Because I think that those rates were developed about 10 years ago, and dentist work has gotten more expensive since then. And so while, they are cutting this recreation benefit, they’re not — They’re taking some of the money that they save from that cut and actually investing it in other health benefits like dental benefits and denture benefits.

So that’s discretionary benefits, getting a cut. You also talked about poverty reduction initiatives. What are those?

Yeah, good question. And an important question. When I saw that in the budget, I didn’t know what they were. And I think that just is an example of how important it is to ask questions and dig a little bit deeper into this document, because you don’t always know from the document itself. And so I asked Armstrong what this program is, and she gave me a pretty, pretty good explanation of it.

There are many items that we cover, we have the provision of baby supply, both for social assistance recipients and low income residents. And we have a fund called Helping Hands, which uses small amounts to cover emergencies, such as if somebody runs out of food in a month and there’s no access to a food bank, or over the counter medication, bus fare, taxi fares. When somebody comes in and there’s an emergency that they need something for, we have a bit of money set aside for that. The baby supplies that can be covered are things like car seats, cribs and booster seats. You can imagine if someone’s in receipt of social assistance, and has a baby that they have to have that just to get the baby home from the hospital. So that’s what we use some of that money for. The remaining amount was used to support other funding applications that reduce poverty and promote social inclusion in the City and County. And so things like the recent rural transportation pilot, the completion of the Age Friendly plan, the pilot site that worked out of — that created a Havelock hub. We funded that for the first year, the initial One City program in downtown we gave them some startup funding for that for the first year. We also supported the low income dental clinic at the health unit and keeping kids healthy program. So if there’s something where somebody needs a bit of extra money to get something that’s socially beneficial going, we would seed fund it I guess is the best word.

So it’s as Armstrong said it helps people to get baby supplies, grocery cards, taxi rides, if they need them, and then this other seed funding for other poverty reduction projects in the city. don’t exactly know how this cut is going to affect those different programs. In 2019, the baby supplies were $30,000, the helping hands fund so that’s like grocery help things like that, was $35,000. And then the seed funding was $75,000. So that all added up to about $140,000. And that’s the number that’s going to cut by 50%. So it’ll be about $70,000. And I’m not sure which of those programs is going to be, receive that cut.

Right. Okay, so those are the cuts. There’s also a couple areas that are getting a little bit of a boost. In this draft budget. Can you talk a little bit about what we know about that? I think it’s in the housing portfolio in particular.

Yeah, homelessness. That’s one area where the city is planning or the draft budget proposes to spend a little bit more money. As I said earlier in our conversation, that’s just a reflection of the increased need, and the increased severity of homelessness in our city right now, especially during COVID-19. And so the city’s contribution to its homelessness programs is expected to rise by about 28%.

And what do we know about why those costs might be going up, especially around homelessness?

Well the city is planning on opening a new 24-seven overflow shelter. And the overflow shelter is currently only run at night. And so staffing it for an extra 12 hours a day is going to be more expensive. I think that social distancing is just reducing the capacity of some of the shelters in Peterborough, and that’s driving up costs. And there’s more information about this is – we’re recording this on Tuesday, November 17, and my understanding is that a report is coming to council next week and will be released this Thursday about how funding of the shelter system is changing. And so I’m looking forward to that report and learning a little bit more about how and why funding of the shelter system is changing.

Mm-hmm, and that’s on homelessness, there’s also affordable housing initiatives in this portfolio, but we’re going to give that it’s own episode. So we’ll dive in the coming weeks… But this has been a look at the draft budget – all of the things we’ve been talking about are draft changes that staff is proposing. What are you looking at in the next week as Council deliberates? What do you think might change?

Yeah. So next week, council gets to take a look at this budget and decide how they feel about it. And I’m yeah, I’m really interested to see how council responds in particular to these, the two service reductions or cuts that are happening in the social services. If we remember back to last year when one of the proposed cuts was the closure of city-run daycares. And, yeah, Council was just not comfortable with that. And so I’m interested to see how this plays out next week.

Yeah, absolutely. I think like talking to Dean a bit about the pressures council’s facing, especially because of this year because of COVID. Like, childcare is particularly a pressure point for a lot of families and folks hurting because of a lack of employment due to this recession. It’s an interesting budget to consider, and I think it’ll be interesting to watch as it plays out.

So thanks for walking us through it, Will, super appreciate your time. Any final thoughts?

No.

Okay, well, thanks.

That’s all for Peterborough Currents this week. On our website you’ll find an article write-up of all the information shared in this episode, as well as a transcript in the show notes.

Coming up next week, we’ll be talking about the climate change action plan, affordable housing and more. I hope you can join us for that.

Music in this episode comes courtesy of the Mayhemingways. My name is Ayesha Barmania. Thanks very much for being with us today, and I’ll talk to you more later. Have a great weekend.

For our second episode of the Budget Week podcast, Peterborough Currents spoke with Su Ditta, executive director of the Electric City Culture Council to learn more about the role of advocates in the budget process and what she’s advocating for the 2021 municipal budget.

The audio in this episode is an edited version of the interview. To listen to the unedited interview, click here.

Hello you’re listening to Peterborough Currents, I’m Ayesha Barmania. This is the second episode of our series on the 2021 Budget Week, and today we’re talking about arts and culture advocacy.

You know, when I first moved to Peterborough, I was drawn to the thriving arts community. Coming back here to Peterborough, I’ve taken advantage of the low, you know, moving back into my house low mortgage. My partner and I are able to do a lot more more work in home digitally. We’re able to rehearse because there are spaces here in Peterborough to be utilized. I’m having clients from Toronto, I’m now in talk about having clients from Toronto come to Peterborough because they are needing spaces to rehearse. Simple things like that, where it’s been overlooked in the past because Toronto has offered all of these resources. But I’m really seeing now that Peterborough has an opportunity to really seize the moment. And an opportunity to maintain that reputation that Peterborough had when I moved here 20 years ago, and this is almost an opportunity to revitalize the arts community because of economically where we all are but because of the the talent that lies here in Peterborough and by doing that we can generate some income and we can bring more work and artists into this area.

That was Peterborough performing artist Beau Dixon speaking at the public budget meeting on Monday. During his presentation he joined the calls for sustained arts funding from the city and more support for artists working during the pandemic.

He added his voice to the calls spearheaded by arts and culture advocacy group EC3 – the Electric City Culture Council.

Since advocacy and lobbying is a major part of the material that gets considered when drafting the budget, I wanted to understand more about how advocacy groups set their priorities and go about their work.

So I called Su Ditta, the executive director of EC3 last Monday and I asked her to start by talking about how she is approaching arts advocacy with regards to this city budget.

So for the 2021 budget, of course, it was different than in previous years, we needed to think about what was going – what the overall situation with finances was going to be with the city, which was that the city was facing a very significant deficit: what kind of money was going to come down from the province and how much of that money might be earmarked for other things, and how much we thought we might be able to ask to be earmarked for our sector.

We have to also be very quick on our feet in terms of a gut reaction that happens in a time of crisis, which is, everything else is more important than the arts or luxury. Because we know from feedback from many, many articles and research papers that have produced in fact, the arts have been a critical critical tool for communities for large populations and small to get through this crisis in good mental and spiritual form.

So we had all of those things in mind.

Then you think about, ‘Okay, what things are we going to do that are direct advocacy or hard advocacy? And what kind of things could we do that are indirect advocacy or soft advocacy?’

So one of the things that’s different in advocating this year around financial support for the arts is that the arts are invisible right now. The venues are closed, exhibitions aren’t happening or happening only recently, in small forums, concerts aren’t happening. ArtsWeek 2020 was cancelled. And that normally happens right before budget discussions. That was a huge issue. And the second one was to kind of – advocacy had to be shaped towards the incredible vulnerability the community has right now. And that there were certain organizations that were having a particularly tough time: the venues that are box office dependent and have high operating costs. So all of those things are informing our work as we prepare the advocacy program.

Absolutely, and you’ve done – EC3 has done a fair bit of research on the impact of COVID-19 and the recession on the local arts community, how are you synthesizing all this information? And what is the – what are the priorities that are coming out of this information you’re looking at?

So organizations in Peterborough say pretty much the same thing that organizations all across the country and internationally say that the first thing to survive and to have a healthy recovery, and better long term future is to have stable basic operating income. So that means that we wanted to argue for no cuts to the community investment and project grants budgets, and to the service grants for arts, culture and heritage organizations. So knowing that that stability is there makes a huge difference to people.

And I wondered if you could just speak a bit to what role do these community grants play in the arts ecosystem?

Municipal – the community grants are essentially the contribution from the municipal level of government to the operating grants of the core major arts organizations in the city. The service grants fund some and I can talk about those separately. But there’s, you know, a group of about I can’t remember exactly, maybe 20 groups that get their municipal level of their operating funding through that program. And it’s absolutely crucial.

So that money combined with provincial money they get, combined with the federal money they get, creates the core operating budget to pay for overhead costs. So to pay staff salaries, rent, office supplies, insurance, all of those really critical things that you can’t go on and carry on with unless you’re paying your utility bill and making sure you’re covered by your insurance and that you have money for basic marketing and promotion and all the things you need to keep your doors open.

You know, there comes a point and I know a number of groups feel now they’re going to just squeak through till the end of the calendar year which for some people is the end of the fiscal year but it was going into next year where things were really really dicey because uncertainty is our worst enemy right now. We have no idea when things can open right up again, no idea when we can get back to our, to our audience to our ticket sales to our fundraising events. So it becomes a certain point where you just can’t carry on.

Absolutely –

You know, this is a sector that knows how to make a dollar go a long way. There is no fat in these organizations. People are grossly underpaid. Artists are grossly underpaid. And it’s a very, very vulnerable sector to work in. So this is an incredibly difficult time.

And one of the things that’s, as it often does come out of a very difficult time is the resilience of some of our arts organizations. We’ve seen Artspace put many exhibitions in its windows. We saw Public Energy organize an incredible suite of outdoor performance activities with Pivot. Same with the Fourth Line. The Art Gallery of Peterborough did their online auction and all the money is going to artists. The Peterborough Singers have found incredibly innovative ways to keep rehearsing. That’s one of their big problems. If they’re not rehearsing all the time, they won’t be ready to perform when there’s a vaccine and when restrictions have lifted. And so they’ve worked incredibly hard, particularly for their staff and their artistic leadership to do many rehearsals three times a week.

People are doing absolutely everything they can. So any cuts would have shaken them to the bone.

These grants, some of them, at least, come with certain requirements that projects be completed or services be provided. How have we seen the pandemic impact organizations’ ability to do those– conduct those activities? And how is– what are you looking for in terms of like any kind of leniency there?

Well, there as I said, there was a comfort condition letter that – it was a good one – that went out with all the grants. And I would say that every major public funder at every level of government has done the same thing. They said, “Here’s the money that you got based on our assessment of your grant application, and in the context of who else was applying, here’s your grant. But we understand these are our special circumstances.”

And I think particularly in last year’s grant applications, which would have been made in December, long before the pandemic. So I think the challenge will be in the assessment process of the Community Investment and Project grants to see you know, what people are actually able to do and what they’re proposing to do next year. But I think that the you know, I think that that kind of open ended granting and trust has to be in place there because we have no idea when people can open again.

In addition to continued support for maintaining basic operations during the pandemic, Ditta says arts organizations need funding for COVID-specific expenses like personal protective equipment, staff training and renovations to promote physical distancing. Especially as a lot of arts organizations hope to reopen in 2021. To help with those costs, EC3 is requesting the city make a contribution to its new Arts Alive Fund.

That’s a fund EC3 has been building in collaboration with the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough. And it’s specifically COVID-19 relief and response funding.

So that would be addressing some of the access to PPE? And –

All of those kinds of things. Yeah, some people may or may need additional support with fixed costs, they may want to start bringing staff back. You know, they may have things they want to do, in terms of virtual initiatives, anything, it’s very wide open. But to date, the City hasn’t provided any relief to the sector. So we were very, very fortunate to have a private individual come forward and donate some money and to offer to help us continue to build the fund. And we had a $20,000 anonymous donation, which really pushed the fund forward. And we know two other cities – it’s really interesting, I am co-chairing this new alliance the Municipal Arts Councils, this one regional Arts Council, and two other cities have exactly the same experience –

Of the City not providing support?

Well, they turned us down or earlier, but we’ll ask again, because this is a very effective way for them to provide this strategic support, this emergency support, because we do all the work.

How does Peterborough stack up against other Ontario municipalities in terms of investment in either public art or the kind of operation fund- operations funding?

I don’t know the numbers on public art. So I’ll tell you, it’s hard to know. And it’s something that we should commission a really good study on if necessary, because different– I mean, there are reports on this and there’s some stats available from Creative Cities Network or from Hill Strategies Research that is kind of like a, you know, a literature review of all different reports that come out. But one of the things that’s difficult is having a consistent baseline.

So people will say that the funding is usually reported on a per capita basis. But what do they include? Do they include the, like our Memorial Center, which does have some entertainment activities, but it’s primarily a sports activity, that they include that in our in an arts and culture, rundown of numbers. If you’re trying to report on where we are, it’s a little bit hard to say, I’ve looked at different numbers, everything I’ve looked at says we’re or lower than most cities, like ours, but I like to throw the numbers around. It’s really hard to establish that baseline.

I think that’s, I think that’s everything I wanted to ask about. Is there any lingering thoughts you wanted to add?

You know, I think that what COVID-19 has shown all of the board and staff members at EC3 and a lot of the incredible team that we work with in the city, you know, all the sponsors of Arts Awards, and all the sponsors of ArtsWeek is how incredibly valued the arts are in this cit, and how vulnerable the sector is to any kind of disruption in its their annual cycle of hard work to raise money. And finally, just how resilient and creative the sector is, what they’ve been able to do under incredibly, incredibly tight the strict restrictions is just extraordinary.

That was my conversation with Su Ditta, executive director of the Electric City Culture Council and advocate for the arts. It was recorded last week on Monday. If you’d like to hear the unedited conversation, there is a link in the show notes on our website: peterboroughcurrents.ca

That’s all for today’s episode of the budget week podcast. If you have a question about the budget that you’d like us to answer – email us at [email protected]

Music in this episode comes courtesy of the Mayhemingways. My name is Ayesha Barmania, and I’ll talk to you later this week. Ciao for now.

To kick off our Budget Week podcast, Peterborough Currents spoke with Dean Pappas, city councillor for town ward and chair of the finance committee about the impact of COVID-19 on the city budget and how the process is unfolding this year.

The audio in this episode is an edited version of the interview. To listen to the unedited interview, click here.

Hi there, you’re listening to Peterborough Currents. My name is Ayesha Barmania.

I feel like I almost don’t need to say it anymore but I’ll say it anyway… 2020 has been an unprecedented year. The measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have had a ripple effect through everything. And as we come closer to the end of the year, we’re beginning to see how it’s impacted the city’s finances in actual numbers.

To kick off our budget week podcast, I called town ward councillor and chair of the city’s finance committee, Deans Pappas to talk about how the budget process works normally how it has been working this year, and also how the pandemic and its recession have impacted it. With city council set to deliberate on the budget next week. I also asked Pappas, what changes he’s hoping council will make to the draft budget before it gets final approval in December.

What you’re about to hear is an edited version of our conversation. If you’d like to hear the unedited version, we have that available on our website. You’ll also find there a transcript of this episode.

I spoke with Councillor Pappas on Tuesday last week. And here’s what we spoke about.

In my mind, it’s one of the most important documents that we have. It outlines how the city will operate for the whole next year, basically, right? It’s our, you know, people say what’s your strategic plan? Well your strategic plan is our budget, right? If you need if you want a project or you want a program or, or a capital project to go forward, it needs to be in in the budget, right?

One thing that I’ve been learning about in kind of preparing this podcast and learning more about city budgets is that it strikes me as like an interesting example and like a collision point for a bunch of different forces that city council has to pay attention to. There is the public and like constituents opinions, but there’s also advocacy groups weighing in, there’s the outside agencies, there’s staff at City Hall and and provincial legislation that you have to take into account. I wondered if you could speak to how these different interests get represented in the budget? And how do you do the kind of balancing act?

Well, and I think that is the big question, right? I think we have to be mindful of it, and I think people need to keep in mind that, you know, the biggest part of the budget that people think we have, is actually non discretionary, that, you know, that is money given to us by other levels of government, like on social services, to be spent for specific programs. So almost the biggest part of our budget is non-discretionary. Because that’s just what it costs to deliver those services. So, some of those costs are mandated like social services are pretty fixed costs. Right. So there’s not a lot of movement there.

Our union costs our collective bargaining agreements, they’re pretty fixed costs. So you might see that there’s, you know, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s a big portion of our budget is just just salaries. So when you see that big number, but we employ 1000 people, so our payroll is pretty big, right? It’s not quite 1000 people, but it’s, it’s in that neighborhood, you know. And so the payroll is pretty large, when you start thinking about what they all get paid. And, you know, and as you move through all the ranks, you know, and they’re all in different departments, from, from housing, to fire to police, on down to library staff to arts, culture, and heritage staff, you know, to arena staff to people picking up the garbage and recycling.

So, they’re, you know, it is a balancing act, right. It’s like, you know, if we fund that, do we, do we have to lay off people at the museum or at the Art Gallery, or do we increase that and do we have not as much garbage pickup? Right? And, you know, I mean, so it’s all intertwined? It’s not, it’s not a linear line? Like, if we cut you know, if – Are you gonna cut transit to pay for something in a different department? I mean, it’s a difficult choice. Right?

Sure. And you had spoken about how the budget can be viewed as almost a strategic plan for the city. Well, what can we read about the city’s priorities in this year’s budget, if we’re – go ahead.

We’re still kind of getting there. But I, I put a I put as much stock as we can in the public engagement piece. And that’s why we kind of started the – we call it the public budget roadshow. I started it two years ago. This year, it got cut short by because of COVID, obviously. However, we still had 500 respondents to our survey, which is a pretty good number. To me, that shows some, you know, people are engaged, there was still, even during COVID people bothered to care about the budget and fill out the public budget survey. And priorities in that were housing, cost of living and social services.

That was the number one, two and three. When you really break it down, there was 12 priorities. But realistically, the top three are what you’re going to be able to kind of tackle.

So how does something like the public survey, how does that get used in the budget deliberation process?

Well, we’d like to have it done in early May and and staff –

In the old days, council used to give priorities to projects like staff would show up with a bunch of projects and programs that they thought were important. And then council would then go ahead and prioritize all of those right? When you do it this way, it’s almost like the public whose community it is. Right? They do all the living and paying in the community – they’re the ones who get to say, well, these are our priorities here. So, and this year was a little bit of a, of an extra survey because of the PDI money. And what did the public want us to do with that? So?

Yeah, so and now staff – just to get back to your question, sorry about that, I wandered a little bit there. But to get back to your question, staff then take those results, instead of presenting them to council like they used to, then we would pick, the staff really take those top three priorities and try to answer some of them in the budget documents, right. You know they take their cue a little bit.

So yeah, well, to take an example, and like you mentioned, from the public survey this year, number one, and two that were listed were housing and social services. And I want to point out also that something like safety and criminal activity came in at eight. I want to try and understand how those results that came in, as I understand it, council directed staff to draft this budget with a capped increase to the police budget, up to 2.18% I think.

One eight. That’s correct.

But I believe there’s also a direction to hire KPMG to look for potential cuts in social services departments, which includes the housing portfolio-

That wasn’t just social services, they were to look at every department.

Okay.

Yeah every department. They came with 16 areas, they felt that we could save money, and some of them are reasonable, some of them aren’t reasonable. But at budget time – I’ve asked staff to actually break out the 16 and insert them and have the reports ready for when we discuss them in budget, so that we can pull them out at that time, but we’ll see where they go on that. But like, but KPMG really did say that there wasn’t a lot of fat left on on the bone or meat on the bone. Did I mix my metaphor? Or meat on the bone or whatever.

You might be looking at meat to trim at this point.

Meat to trim, I know.

The police budget is up to the police to bring back. We recommend a cap or a guideline for their increase. And I believe that was a six to five vote at 2.18%. That, you know, there are some councillors that wanted to have a higher guideline. So yeah, you probably know where I would have gone.

But so then it’s up to the police by the Police Services Act. We can’t direct the police operationally. So we can give we can say no to the budget. Like when they finally do present their budget here on Tuesday of next week, the police will present their budget to Council and the council will debate it on Wednesday of next week or the week after. We can say no and send it back to them.

Could you have said – sorry – could you have capped the increase at zero percent? I noticed outside agencies had to be kept at zero percent this year.

Well, the police, you can’t cap it, you can suggest the budget guideline to them. So we could – so, because of the way the Police Services Act is structured, we could have suggested zero or a lower number than 2.18%. Which I would have been you know, I would have been up for debate on any number. Right. So. But we needed to but that was what council settled on. Six councillors settled on that. You know, there are many councillors that wanted a higher number.

Yeah absolutely, um, to kind of switch gears and talk a bit about – so we’ve been talking kind of more about services and expenditures at this point, but to kind of turn more towards the sort of revenue side of things, I guess.

There aren’t any this year. (laughter)

Well, I want to return to – so council was struggling this past summer to agree on a number for the property tax increase. And as I understand it, there was no consensus.

They didn’t.

You didn’t and so staff has come back with a proposed 2.87% property tax increase.

That’s correct.

I want to just kind of try and understand that process like has giving – has leaving it up to staff to propose the increase given a bit more leeway to this budget? Or, like what options has it opened up?

It’s the first time in my memory that council couldn’t agree on a guideline. Like we’ve always been able to get in the ballpark. Normally, it’s a range that we give them. Like in the past – when I was first elected to council, it would have been a range like 1.5% to 2% in that range, and staff would come in in the middle somewhere. And then when Darryl became mayor, we gave them a hard number. And then this is the first year that we haven’t been able to give them any number.

I think there’s a number of reasons for that. Everybody has a different number in their head I guess. I just think and I see this recession that we’re in, in a very clear way maybe because I’m on George Street every day. The people who could afford to work from home, you know, can afford to work virtually, many of them – I can’t say all because that’s never the rule – but there were many people who could work from home and they didn’t miss a lot of paychecks. Work virtually, right? Many of the other – the middle income people and the people in the service industry, they were minimum wage earners, they did lose their jobs. Right so to me, there’s a real discrepancy in this recession that we’re in.

You know, if you just look at all the billionaires – I don’t want to get on my soapbox but – you know the top one percent during the pandemic they really did increase their overall wealth during the pandemic if you look at the numbers. I just think, to me when I’m trying to argue for a lower number, I really believe that we need to give people a break here.

So you’d like to see the increase lower than 2.87%?

Absolutely. I don’t think people can afford that. And even in the commercial area, those costs are passed on by businesses. If a business owns its property, it’s paying taxes.

So this draft budget that we’re looking at is pretty, like perfectly balanced. With the 2.87% property tax increase, accounting for loss of revenue elsewhere. What would you suggest? Like what concrete savings solutions might be out there if we went with a lower percent increase?

Well, I think that’s what we have to go through and look at, right? I know that Councillor Beamer has offered up a bunch of cuts. There is 0.45% I believe – sorry I don’t have the budget book in front of me, I apologize – I think it’s 0.45% of that is, is going directly to a debenture, which is like a mortgage for a city this year, so we can do some more capital works this year. So our capital budget is $70 million. If you were to pull that out, it would come down to about $61 million. So that’s still a good chunk of money for capital this year. And you can shave a bit off the taxes there too.

Okay, gotcha.

So that’s just one example of how you can shave that down without touching services, you know what I mean?

It seems like you’re walking a very, very tight line between, like austerity, and but also like injecting cash and keeping up services for the folks who need it who are also hurting because of COVID.

Yeah, I’ve been telling people I believe we’re in a three year kind of recovery that we need to manage our way through, I think this year was really going to be about survival for people. Right, and then after that, we could almost relaunch.

The economy and the pandemic are hopelessly tied together. Until we solve the pandemic and save people’s lives, we’re definitely going to be in a recession and we’re going to be on hard times.

Absolutely. And what’s the starting point that we’re coming into this kind of recovery period? Like, what can you tell me about the deficit that we’re carrying?

Yeah, the COVID. The effects of COVID – because of loss of revenue and increased costs for services, that will cost roughly $21 million this year. So that’s $21 million dollars, we didn’t have.

We got some relief money for social services and transit, which was two of the bigger pots of money where we ran over, because we have to, because no one’s going to be left out in the cold, right? We have to make sure that we have services for people. And, yeah, we have to run transit. Even though it’s not a mandated service, it is an essential service.

Sure so not mandated by the province, but –

It’s not mandated. You don’t have to have a bus service. But you should have a bus service.

Right.

But social services is mandated by the province and both of those chewed up our budget. So we got some money from the feds and the province to cover off those two.

And then we’ve had to raid our reserve funds to come up with a lot of other money, which a lot of that will have to be paid back from future revenues.

And as I understand it, municipalities aren’t allowed to carry a deficit from year to year, has there been any leniency from the province on that kind of requirement? Or?

No, and I don’t expect there to be actually. So we’re still about $2.7 million short. But staff are confident that they’re gonna be able to make that up this year, the problem is that that affects future revenue streams, because they’ll have to pay back those reserves. So there’s going to be a bit of an accordion effect. We can pay it off now, but then future revenues will also be down.

Sure. So I wonder if you could make a little bit more concrete, what we might be looking at in terms of, you know, making up this deficit later. Like, are we thinking about higher user fees, higher tax rates, like in future years?

Well, I think – and here’s just my thoughts – we’re not counting on any casino revenues this year. So those are in the budget. So without going into austerity cuts, you could – that’s not money we’re counting on – so you could use that money to pay back the money you borrowed from your reserve accounts in future years. So that would be one year of the casino would actually pay that back. That’s about $3 million.

So we’re $2.7 million short. You know what I’m saying? So you’re almost there. If you just don’t budget anything for the casino for a couple of years, you’ll be up on the plus side

As long as it meets all of its costs.

And yeah. And before COVID it is it was paying around that – it was paying about $2.8 million is what we were getting from the casino.

Great. And so. So coming into my second to last question. So you talked a bit about how you want to see a lower property tax increase. But I also wondered, just in general, how do you feel this budget, this draft budget at the moment strikes its balance? And is there anything at this point that you’d like to see changed before it’s voted on in December?

Well, as far as the number goes – when you look at other communities that are, you know, there’s lots of other comparators that we can see.

You pay more for property tax in Peterborough like we’re the fifth highest taxed city in our classification in Ontario. But you know, it’s a bit of a – I don’t have the numbers in front of me, I should have looked them up and if you give me a second I can – but if you look at say, Milton, for instance, their average household income is about $110,000 a year, and they’re paying, they’re paying $1,700 per household in property taxes.

And if you start looking around what other cities are paying, and what the average household income is, then, we’re actually really high. Like we’re not anywhere where we should be on both of them. Our average household income is $54,000. And the average house in Peterborough is paying $4,200 in property taxes. Throw on insurance, and a mortgage payment, and, you know, there’s not much left.

You know, so I think it’s all tied together, like people’s ability to pay, you know, the fact that we don’t have enough jobs and jobs are important. And other people don’t like talking about jobs all the time. But it gives people a sense of purpose, it allows you to have some freedom that you can, you know, you have money in your pocket, you can do what you want gives you that kind of financial freedom, right?

So I think they are both tied together. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in Peterborough, we have high taxes and a low income, whereas other cities our size have a much higher income and lower taxes. So we’re a little the wrong way, and that’s a hard cycle to get out of.

So my last question is kind of on a different topic. So the meeting on Monday is one of the opportunities for the public to weigh in. There have been several over the year. And we’re actually not that far out from when the budget deliberations or the budget roadshow would start for the 2022 budget.

What do you think is most useful for the public to weigh in on? And how do you hope to engage with constituents on the budget?

You know, I always tell people to please, you know, there’s lots of ways to contact us. Most councillors are pretty happy to talk to their constituents, I always answer the phone when you call in. And you know, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can if I’m at work, or I’m from getting my flu vaccine, I’ll always try to get back to you as soon as I can after that.

And I just think everybody has their own whatever project and you know, what I’ve learned about the budget is people have their own what they think is important to them and their community. And we need to hear that, as councillors and as politicians.

The thing is, sometimes it might take a while. And I don’t want people to be discouraged that, you know, I went and asked for my road to get paved, or I went and asked for my community garden to get put in or I needed new playgrounds or I need a pollinator in my area. Whatever your project is or whatever your passion is – that’s great. We love that as councillors. So don’t be discouraged. Just sometimes it takes a while for that to kind of transpire. So, yeah, just don’t give up. Just keep coming back. Keep coming back and, you know, that’s how things get into the budget eventually..

That’s great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dean and for taking me through this. I really, really appreciate it.

That was my conversation with City Councillor Dean Pappas, who is the Chair of the Finance Committee. That’s all for this episode of the Budget Week podcast from Peterborough Currents. We’re covering the municipal budget deliberations over the next few weeks with podcasts and articles, which you can find on our website: www.peterboroughcurrents.ca

Have a question about the budget that you’d like us to look into? Email us at [email protected]

Music in this episode comes courtesy of Mayhemingways.

My name is Ayesha Barmania and I’ll talk to you later this week.

Introducing a new podcast from Peterborough Currents all about the 2021 municipal budget deliberations.

On Monday November 16, 2020, citizens will have one of their last opportunities to publicly address city council regarding the 2021 draft budget. The following week, city council will sit as the finance committee to deliberate and make any changes to the budget it deems necessary. City council is scheduled to approve the budget on December 14, 2020.

The municipal budget shapes how our city will operate for the next year and beyond — the decisions that are made during budget week range from how much funding will there be for the arts, to what money is available for public transit services, to which roads and bike trails will get a facelift.

Because of these significant decisions and because the budget poses a key exercise in how our local democracy works, Peterborough Currents is exploring the budget process over the next few weeks through this podcast and through a series of articles.

Our first episode comes out on November 16, 2020. You can subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast apps, or listen through our website.

Do you have a question or perspective about the city budget? Email us at [email protected].

The music in this podcast comes courtesy of the MAYHEMINGWAYS.

Two stories: (01:10) a look at memory loss due to brain injury by LA Alfonso; and (10:30) an interview with filmmaker Natasha Luckhardt on her documentary Town of Widows.

This episode produced by Ayesha Barmania.

Music by John Whelan.

Three stories today: (00:25) Chris Lawson on the purpose of fun in our lives and society; (14:30) media artist Lester Alfonso on finding his creativity; (17:00) a preview of the next episode of Peterborough Currents about housing insecurity and tents.

This episode is hosted by Ayesha Barmania and has contributions from Lester Alfonso, Chris Lawson and Nick Taylor. Our music is produced by John Whelan.

A role reversal on today’s show! Ayesha shares their story about internet anxieties and guest host Jeffrey Moore, an internet security and digital forensics student at Fleming College, walks us through how to start thinking and dealing with your data security.

Many thanks to the Digital Rights Community Grant Program a partnership between Digital Justice Lab, Tech Reset Canada and Centre for Digital Rights for supporting our Community Journalism Workshop that helped make this episode possible.

For more information on your data security, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self Defense resource guide: https://ssd.eff.org/

Want to contribute to Peterborough Currents? Get in touch!

This month, we’re exploring the concept of ‘digital rights’ on the podcast in a series of episodes, each with one story of a local understanding of our rights and freedoms as they intersect with computers and the internet. In this episode, Ayesha speaks with Ryan Oliver, the founder and executive director of the Pinnguaq Association.

Pinnguaq is based in Lindsay and works in Ontario, B.C. and Nunavut to bring computer education resources to under-served communities. And beyond just increasing access, they’ve adopted a model to localize computer education in local cultures, and adopted a model to increase community resilience by having community members become the teachers.

We’ll be exploring more concepts of digital rights over the month of May, and if you subscribe to our podcast feed you’ll receive those automatically on your device.

Find out more about Pinnguaq: https://pinnguaq.com/

Join us for a community journalism workshop: https://peterboroughcurrents.ptbopodcasters.ca/2019/02/08/join-us-for-a-community-journalism-workshop/

Share your take on social media or in the comments below. How do you think of digital rights? Do you think we have a right to access computers? Search for Peterborough Currents on Facebook and Twitter to chat with us.

This episode and our community journalism workshop on digital rights are supported by the Digital Rights Community Grant Program a partnership between Digital Justice Lab, Tech Reset Canada and Centre for Digital Rights. Thank you for supporting our work!

Subscribe to Peterborough Currents: https://peterboroughcurrents.ptbopodcasters.ca/2017/10/07/how-to-subscribe/