The City of Weyburn laid out the 2020 budget at their meeting on Monday. The budget includes a total of $43.4 million in expenses for the year, $18.7 million of that for capital expenses, and the remainder for operating expenses. To help fund the spending plans for the city for the coming year, it included a residential property tax increase of 3.9 percent. 

The budget also included a $100 reduction in the hospital levy. This worked out to an effective reduction in the tax bill for homeowners of 4.35 percent.

We asked our readers what they thought of the 2020 Budget. In the poll here on Discover Weyburn, we asked if the budget this year received a passing grade. The response was not a positive one, with 66.7 percent of those who took part in the poll saying no, the budget was not a good one. Just 33.3 percent said they would give the budget a passing grade.

Weyburn Mayor Marcel Roy explained the budget has a focus on infrastructure, which is something needed for a growing community.

“Infrastructure, a lot was behind, everything has come to its end on that,” Roy said. “In the past, the City was able to go along without doing a lot of infrastructure, now the infrastructure has to happen.”

The amount the city would have to pay from their own coffers has also increased in recent years. Roy pointed to the reduction in funding from the province as a number of costs have been downloaded to municipalities. He said the province was funding upwards of 80 percent of infrastructure work in previous decades, but that has now shrunk to 60 percent in recent years due to a reduction in money coming from the province, and to an extent, the federal government.

“City administration has done a fairly good job, I would say, on there, and not patting ourselves on the back, to try to keep the city moving forward while we’re struggling with our provincial government and federal government doing basically, absolutely nothing for all the cities in the province,” Roy stated.