Town votes to approve 2025 capital, operational budgets

By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Town of Strathmore council has voted to approve the capital and operating budgets for the upcoming 2025 year, as of the Dec. 4 regular meeting.

Council was presented with a summary of their deliberations and decisions regarding the budgets over the roughly seven-week budget period. 

Departmental budget summaries were distributed to Council Nov. 1, which kicked off the discussion period.

Through budget deliberations, Town of Strathmore council reviewed their operating, capital, and community group funding budgets, making adjustments and amendments where they saw best fit.

Goals among council largely were to keep tax increases to residents and businesses as low as possible, all the while providing funding for local infrastructure and expansion, and to see as few dramatic impacts as possible to community groups and services. 

“In our operating budget, we had a reduction in our operating expenses which was the $50,000 on going from $400,000 to $350,000 for funding of our fiscal sustainability reserve – there was an administrative amendment for transfer to reserves to support our non-recurring expenditures over the next few years, and then we had an adjustment for $10,000 to our community events,” said Leana Ashbacher, senior manager of financial services with the Town of Strathmore. “Within our capital budget, we had no amendments, and then in our community group funding, we had a reduction of $15,100, and then to balance the budget, we had a reduction of $148,100, which then takes us from our original starting point of the 4.5 per cent of increase in our budget, down to a 3.62 (per cent increase) for a total operating budget of $48.63 million.”

Following Ashbacher’s summary of the budget deliberations, Coun. Denise Peterson motioned for council to adopt the 2025 operating budget in the amount of $39,319,000, and the 2025 capital budget in the amount of $9,313,000.

“I think this budget was really prudent. I was a little disappointed that council did not accept almost any of the proposed reductions in spending – I was hopeful we could get that tax increase even lower,” said Coun. Brent Wiley. “I am still going to be supporting this budget because administration has put forward I think a very intelligent budget; it actually lowers operations spending, it invests in our reserves, it pays down our debt, and (through) all of that it maintains services even under all the inflationary pressures that we have been experiencing.”

Town of Strathmore council voted unanimously in favour of the budget following Wiley’s comments without further discussion or debate.