Robbing Paul To Pay Peter

When I left the Council Chamber at 11.15p.m. on Tuesday,,several weighty items remained to be decided.
One was $450,000 for an exteded  contract with a company   because the unit price was favourable.
It was discovered this year,the company had been  providing the same service to the Town of Newmarket for ten per cents less. 
Doesn't that make you feel  warm and protected all over ?
The service is cutting open perfectly fine sewer pipes to insert fibre glass lining which, in theory, is supposed to prevent  ground water from seeping into the pipes.
The purpose is to reduce sewage flow to the York Durham  trunk sewer and allow  more capacity  for development.
We have just now learned is there's no way to prove the practice is effective. We have been doing it for ten years.
No way to measure  ground water in the first place let alone that it actually enters  sanitary sewers.
We installed  storm sewers throughout the town to take away ground water. 
Regional  municipalities have been doing  the relining stunt for years. They are probably doing it in Durham Region as well.
Millions  have been spent already.
Yet when I asked the previous Tuesday how much ground water was being prevented from entering the pipes, the answer was, they have no way of knowing.
The Region is planning to spend more millions to find out,
 I called the item from the  agenda on Tuesday  to ask for a recorded vote.
I didn't expect  support to reject the recommendation.

$325,000 is a full point on the tax rate. Taxes were increased 4.5 per cent  or thereabouts in 2012
.
Another item on the agenda was a recommendation on what to do with the surplus from 2011.
Supplementary assessment in 2011, was twice as much as forecast.
Revenues from planning application fees were higher than anticipated. Combined,. the surplus was in excess of a million.
The Chief Financial Officer recommended it be tucked away in a reserve fund for a rainy day. 
Regulations used to be, a municipality can not budget for a deficit or a surplus.  We could not ake more in taxes that th cost of providing  services.
If a surplus happened,.it had to be applied to the next year's budget in order to ensure it was returned to those who had overpaid.
.Taxes were increased again this year by a rate that surplus would have wiped out. 
I think last year's contract for the cockamamie scheme to re-line sewer pipes to prevent ground water seepage was about $900,000. If it hadn't been spent, there might have been no increase in the taxes last year either.
It's one of the changes I notice between now and times past. 
No Council  or administration would have given a minute's thought to tucking away millions of dollars in surpluses into a reserve fund
to maintain  high annual tax increases 
It would  have meant certain defeat in the next election.