Police budget finalized
Posted Jan 6, 2010 01:38:01 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Waterloo Regional Police are ready to take their 2010 budget to the next level with a tax increase well under 1%, but with far fewer new officers.
At the Police Services Board meeting this morning, board members and staff made some last-minute cuts from the draft budget that had already been worked down to a .99% tax increase.
A reduction in how many new officers and new civilian officers will come in 2010 got the tax increase down to .87%, for a total operating budget of roughly $113-million.
Those numbers go to Regional Council on Wednesday, January 13 for consideration.
Director of Administration and Finance for the police service, Joe Steiner, says new hires were reduced from 20 uniform officers to 10; 24 civilian officers to 10; and cutting equipment requests to the 2009 levels.
Board Chair, Tom Galloway, tells 570 News even though a .99% increase was a fantastic number, it gets mixed into Waterloo Region’s overall tax increase, and any extra whittling away would be worth it.
Galloway says the revised hiring numbers will still be functional in terms of the needs of the police force, and still shows a commitment to the hiring plan, that plan just won’t be implemented quite as quickly.
