‘It’s creating chaos’: Regional budget talks set to stretch into next week

Regional council was set to finalize the 2025 Regional Budget on Wednesday, but after 15 hours of discussion, councillors voted tentatively to reconvene next Friday.

The day-long meeting brought forward various details on how to streamline and tackle next year’s budget, with a focus on individual finances and supporting local services.

While budget meetings may be daunting for councillors to manage, the sheer amount of information and “abstract ideas” led to an arduous day filled with “chaos.”

“In my opinion, this is a very, very bad process and it’s creating chaos,” said Councillor Doug Craig. “All I’ve got is a bunch of numbers. I got a lot of abstract ideas floating around and this is not how you do a budget properly.”

Craig said the entirety of the meeting felt pulled in multiple different directions, with various issues and opinions being introduced throughout the meeting. He said it created difficult conditions for members who simply wanted to better understand the situation.

“This process started at 9 a.m. this morning and is leaving a lot of us just quite stunned about what is happening at the last minute. I would suggest strongly that we stop the meeting now and pick another date, come back, and staff would have an opportunity to give us a reasonable reply to what is going on.”

While various areas still need to be tackled by council, including property taxes for 2025, there were some areas that members were able to make progress and approvals for.

Firstly, council approved a $756,000 boost in support for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, now increasing overall funding up to $1.5 million.

“This funding is a lifeline for our community,” said CEO of The Food Bank of Waterloo Region, Kim Wilhelm. “With food insecurity impacting one in eight households in Waterloo region, this increase will allow us to continue meeting the growing demand for food assistance and provide vital support to those in need.”

Council agreed to reduce funding towards the service expansion for the Plan to End Chronic Homelessness by $2 million, now down to $4.7 million.

“This is not our sole investment in addressing homelessness and we have lots of resources both that are more upstream to prevent people from becoming unhoused as well as many millions of dollars of resources going into above and beyond what’s currently proposed on the table here,” said Councillor Natasha Salonen. “We, like with everything, need to look everywhere for possible opportunities that make sense in hard budget times.”

One aspect of the reduction discussed by council is the general lack of potential government support when it comes to tackling the homeless crisis in the region. Members argue the region needs to effectively distribute the finances it currently has access to, to manage more independently. Councillor Craig said the lack of future support from the Ontario government has created various problems and questions ahead.

“Municipalities are constitutional orphans, we have no power. We could say anything we want to the provincial government and they simply don’t listen. I brought this up repeatedly, as a number of the rest of you have, and our MPPs locally, that’s where the question is, what are they doing?”

At the end of the day, council agreed that the $2 million could be better used in different areas, with plenty of issues still yet to be discussed for the budget.

“I’m not saying we should give up on anything, but I think we do need to find some savings,” said Councillor Sandy Shantz. “We’re going to come across some other big asks later in the budget process and, if we don’t have a spot identified now, the likelihood of needing that money in 2025 is pretty low. I’m not saying give up on it completely, but I’m saying take it out of the 2025 budget.”

When midnight rolled around, council agreed that it needed to schedule another meeting to tackle the remaining subjects that didn’t have time to be introduced.

A tentative meeting is currently set for Friday morning on Dec. 20.