CANMORE – The fiscal year may not yet be over for the Town of Canmore, but municipal officials are already anticipating a budget surplus from its 2019 operations.
According to Ric Irwin, the Town’s senior finance officer, year-to-date results indicate “conformance with the overall 2019 budget,” with an estimate of a surplus of approximately $1.5 million by the end of the year.
“Not too much has changed since I spoke with you back in June,” said Irwin.
“Both planning fees and business registry revenue continue to exceed budget because of the general level of development and economic activity that’s going on within the town.”
Planning fees, as of Aug. 31, are running at a surplus of an estimated $368,000, while business registry revenue has seen a surplus of approximately $47,000.
Irwin added that year-to-date variances in the operational budget are largely attributed to timing differences and savings between actual versus budgeted transactions, as well as various flow-through reserve and funding entries that are not accounted for until year-end.
“RCMP fine revenue also is trending higher than budget,” said Irwin.
“This is opposite of what we’ve seen over past few years actually, as there’s been a renewed police focus on traffic safety in 2019 … Currently we’ve only received 50 per cent of our policing grants annual allocation. Further payment of the roughly $200,000 is subject to formal provincial budget review.”
The provincial budget was released Thursday (Oct. 24) and the UCP government indicated police service funding, as well as funding for libraries and Family and Community Support Services would remain the same as previous budgets.
In April, the finance committee unanimously agreed to transfer a $1.4 million surplus from 2018 into five reserves.
“That works out to 2.8 per cent of our annual expenditures of roughly $50 million, which is right in line given municipalities can’t budget or incur unfunded deficits,” said Iriwn at the April 23 meeting.
Irwin indicated the unexpected surplus was the result of the planning department’s and the RCMP-policing budgets recording a better than anticipated net operating deficit of $825,000 and $187,000 respectively. The Town also saved a total of $413,000 in other expenses. Nearly a third of the surplus – $447,000 – was transferred to the municipality’s general operating reserve, while another $349,000 was moved to the Town’s tax stabilization reserve.
Since then, Irwin has indicated not much has changed, with the Town still looking at a surplus in this year’s budget. However, he indicated year-end savings, such as in the case of snow and ice control expenses, will be dependent on the weather during November and December.
“Year-to-date payroll savings so far is about $890,000. In fact, it’s about a million dollars at the end of September, versus the annual budget of about $500,000,” said Irwin.
“This a result of a couple of things this year. Firstly, there were quite a number of new positions in 2019 as well as vacancies from 2018 that weren’t filled right away.”
Irwin said he expects the overall budget surplus by end of year to be approxiately $1.5 million.
“Looks like we’re perhaps headed for another significant surplus to address at the end of the year,” said Mayor John Borrowman.
More details on the Town’s budget will be presented on Nov. 7. Go to www.canmore.ca for more information.
