A lot of numbers have been floating around during Jasper town council’s 2012 operating budget deliberations, but none as low as the 3.6-per-cent municipal tax increase that passed last week.

The original proposed budget, released in mid-November, included a 4.1-per-cent increase. That number was later increased to 6.7 per cent because of a massive jump in electricity rates and higher than anticipated utility usage in 2011. Then, before the holidays, with the help of a few cuts by council, the reduction of fire dispatch fees and the allocation of utility costs to users, the proposed tax increase was reduced to 4.3 per cent.

Some final budget cuts were made during the first council meeting of the year, Jan. 3, reducing the tax increase to 3.6 per cent. It was then unanimously approved by council.

Also approved were increases to utility fees, with water increasing by 1.7 per cent, sewage by 4.9 per cent and solid waste by 2.5 per cent.

With tax and utility increases, a home with an assessed value of $750,000 can expect a monthly increase of $7.69, or an annual increase of $92.28.

The operating budget has revenues and expenditures balanced at approximately $12.8 million. 

The final changes to the budget included cutting $15,000 in spending on legal fees and the removal of $26,620 from the corporate services budget that was double-counted for the salary and benefits of a bylaw officer.

The $15,000 reduction was made up of $5,000 from the administration budget and $10,000 from the family and community services budget. The rationale for the cut was that in the last five years, the most the municipality has spent on legal fees is $34,299 and the least, in 2011, was $18,723.

To ensure the municipality doesn’t find itself in a deficit because of unforeseen legal matters, council also unanimously voted to create a legal reserve, beginning with $20,000 from the municipality’s unrestricted reserves. 

In years to come, if there is money left over in the municipality’s legal budgets, it will be carried into the legal reserve, until it reaches a maximum of $50,000.

The other change to the budget was the correction of an administrative error.

The over-budgeting of $26,620 was an oversight that occurred because of the dispersal of salaries and benefits for bylaw enforcement, with the majority of the cost coming from bylaw and the remainder from the health and safety budget.

“This is a question of double counting,” explained Verne Balding, director of corporate and legislative services. “(What is now in the finalized budget) is what we had thought that we had budgeted for, but we hadn’t counted the money that was in the health and safety budget.”

Currently there are three bylaw officers on staff, along with a department manager. Balding told council at an earlier meeting that a full staff is 2.5 officers and a manager, so the department is currently overstaffed.

He said by taking the $26,620 out of the budget, it leaves the municipality with two options.

“Either we lose someone in the next three or four months, and I think we will, or we don’t lose that someone in the next three or four months and we lay a position off, either before or at the end of the summer depending how our summer staffing works. 

“So if we lost that person in the next couple months and hired the summer staff person, at the end of the year, we would show probably a slight salary surplus.”