Londoners will have to find a few extra dollars for their property tax bill in 2023 as the city finalizes a budget with over $1-billion in spending.
At a long committee meeting on Thursday, councillors wound up with a proposed property tax increase of 3.1 per cent.
For the average London home, valued at Municipal Property Assessment Corporation at $241,000, that would be an increase of $98. At the beginning of the deliberations, the increase was at 3.9 per cent, or $122.
The meeting, which took more than seven hours, was a lengthy one.
"Excellent job to everyone, realizing for a lot of our colleagues around the table this was your first budget update. The multi-year budget will take longer and be more passionate," joked budget chair and ward 12 Councillor Elizabeth Peloza.
Some of the big changes included spending less money on closing the infrastructure gap, cutting some downtown tree planting out of the budget, and changes to the city's Ontario Works budget.
City staff also found $6.5-million in savings within their own departments.
A proposed cut to the sidewalk snowplow budget did not go ahead, however. It would have taken $750,000 off of the final budget.
City of London sidewalk plows are deployed when there are five centimetres of snow on the ground, down from eight centimetres in 2020. A motion to put the number back to eight centimetres failed.
"I'm not going to be afraid to recognize when something I championed hasn't worked out the way I hoped it would," said Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis. "Before we went to five centimetres, in the 2019-2020 winter, we had 105 complaints. Since we went to the lower standards, 303 and 232. We are never going to get to bare concrete conditions with snowplows. Are we going to continue to spend money on something that really hasn't proven to increase resident satisfaction?"
However, Lewis' argument wasn't successful. The potential cut lost 9-5.
The budget update will be finalized on February 14 at a council meeting.
Next year, a new four year budget will be approved that will run until 2027.
