City Chief Administrative Officer tells Council what the 2025 budget is all about

By Pepper Parr

November 12^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Hassaan Basit: It’s a short-term pain for a long-term gain to have a modernized system.

“It’s a 700 page budget” said CAO Hassaan Bait.  “I want to start off first by thanking all of you. We’ve had a lot of discussions that were not all budget related, but they all informed what the priorities are. This wasn’t a normal year. We have a new software system that will let us access all that data the city has – that hasn’t always been the case. That might not sound like a big deal, but you know, if at home and you open a drawer where you’ve always kept something and it’s not there anymore. Think back to those emotions, you’ll find it eventually. That’s where we are right now. It’s a short term pain for a long term gain to have a modernized system.

Staff has also been working with a restructuring within the city. Things have been moved around, now called different things. So a lot of work has gone into this.

“Now, how do I feel about the budget? A number of people have asked me that  – I think the budget really does prioritize operational excellence. I think it looks to balance a lot of things. You’ve heard a lot of delegations today; I think a lot of them wished you luck in trying to balance those priorities.

The July floods came out of nowhere – the city now knows that there are going to be others and has budgeted for the future.

I think the budget addresses some key challenges, including recovery efforts from July’s flooding  –  It looks at the resiliency of city services against the backdrop of that, I think we are looking at a lot of council priorities – that will become clear as we go through the presentation

I don’t see any shiny objects in this budget, but I do see it being inspired by where I where I feel the community wants us to go,  where Council has wanted us to go. Examples are key investments in the target, storm water management, infrastructure repairs, core services, public safety, transit, road maintenance, all of those things are here. By focusing on sustainability, climate resilience, we are preparing Burlington, not just for today, but for future challenges as well.

I’m sure you’ve seen these four principles, they were in the mayor’s direction to staff as well. If you  take them as just words, they all sound good. You can put them, you know, in front of every document, but here’s what we’ve done with some of them, and it was about balancing between all of these without sacrificing any of them. That’s the key here.

Hassaan Basit: There are a lot of core, fundamental things that the city needs to focus on.

Look at affordability; we’ve looked at and retained things like our low income tax relief, our transit subsidies, other fee subsidies. We focused on essential services identified by the community. We are looking to continue to attract and grow businesses, to expand that tax base and ease resident tax burdens. These are long term strategies you need. There are a lot of core, fundamental things that the city needs to focus on. They don’t all show up on a balance sheet every single year. But strategically they are important. We are continuously looking to drive efficiencies, use non tax revenues, where we can manage inflation impacts, which has eaten away at our ability to maintain and enhance services, to support quality of life as the city grows by perhaps up to 40% over the next 25 years.

Bateman has been a controversial decision from the very beginning. The city was looking to community organizations for ideas – they got more than they expected.

We are going to be relaunching our 25 year horizon, including the multi year simulations, and, yeah, it is a dynamic environment. There are a lot of assumptions that go into predicting, what would happen –  what will happen with population growth. We are trying to do is come up with a dynamic model that really allows us to manage as those assumptions come true or not. The key here is that we do need to do long range planning, and we do need to show that we’re taking small steps every year toward those long range targets. Long range doesn’t just mean we’ll worry about it in 25 years. We’re funding key projects like Skyway and Robert Bateman Center.

We are investing in By Law enforcement, urban forestry, transit, fire safety, speed enforcement, all priorities all related to very tangible services, looking at sustainability, so ensuring the long term upkeep of our roads, parks, community centers and a dedicated 2% infrastructure Levy. These are all balanced in this budget, strengthening financial health by looking at our debt levels, our reserve levels, advocacy for government support, all of those things are in here, adjusting fees where we can for inflation and perhaps market standards, transparency.

Eric Stern, spokesperson for a community group that has major concerns with the 2025 budget points to the word PROPOSED on the budget book.

We heard a lot through the community. They wanted simplified budgets. So we’ve tried to do that. We’ve also tried to present more information earlier than we ever have in the past. From what I can understand, more visuals, less jargon, more infographics, which you’ll see in this budget, and earlier and more accessible engagement opportunities, multi channel, with lots of time dedicated by people around this table attending those.

So what’s the bottom line here? The 2025 budget is at $471 million. One of the  key investments is $103 million budget for our capital projects. These are upgrades to parks, storm water management, safer roads, all of those things. We’re looking at expanded community services through transit, enhanced fire, again, parks and recreation – a lot of investment in front line, community facing services. We are looking at technology investments in software systems to make city services more efficient, more user friendly. We’re also looking at a lot of cost avoidance by upping our technological capabilities. We are adding new positions to the city as well –  30 full time positions.  A big chunk of them, a third of them, are in transit. We also are adding positions in Bylaw, in forestry, in fire emergency response. I think, trending in the right direction in terms of the investments that this council has made in in the city’s staffing and capabilities. The Bateman and Skyway, operationalizing will mean a property tax increase. My approach to presenting preliminary budgets is that they be as accurate as they as they can be.

I don’t like the used car salesman approach, where we come in June with a 12% projected increase and then look like absolute heroes later saying: Look, we cut it in half. It was a pretty lean budget in June and I feel comfortable with what is before Council.

I want to mention that because we heard a little bit through some of the delegations, we’re constantly relocating resources, even positions, to address what are in some cases burning platform issues. In some cases they are new priorities that emerge, or an emphasis in more area is required in certain years. We are constantly shuffling those things. Those are administrative decisions. You can’t always include then in a budget book, but that is occurring, and that’s one of the reasons we’re starting to see hold steady on our head count this year.

The numbers on the Burlington line are based on the Current Value Assessment (CVA) of your property. For every $100,000 of CVA your taxes were the figure ($464.27) in 2024 and are projected to be $499.10 in 2025.  The data comes from page 31 of the budget book.

That translates to holding our budget increases lower than they were last year, lower than they were the year before. They’re trending in the right direction.

You know, we’d all like them to be lower, but we’re making investments that I think will bear fruit in coming years.

This is a transformational year. It’s setting up a shift to a new, improved organizational state, and I think by the end of 2025 our organization, the city, will be more aligned, more efficient, more innovative, with clear goals and stronger internal processes.

Now that’s not just jargon. What are the exact projects that we’re working on right now? Streamlining, enhancing workflows to improve efficiency and support better outcomes. We are investing heavily, big focus on KPIs with dashboards being introduced to ensure real-time progress tracking against projects, transparent project funding. We are looking at establishing a starting point for data-driven improvements across the city which will mean new baselining. We are looking at revamping our risk framework to combine strategic planning with operations and budgeting into one cohesive approach.

We’re looking at our long term vision, the 2050 horizon and get a fix on our North Star and how do we get to it? We are reviewing our board and agency relationships. We are looking at brand renewal, moving towards a unified brand identity to reflect our mission, strength, internal unity. A number of comments  were made about staff performance reviews  – that’s coming in January.  Everybody who works at the city will have performance goals. They will be tied to organizational priorities, departmental priorities  – compensation will be tied to the to that.

A lot of things are occurring behind the scenes; these initiatives are starting to drive change now and will have a real impact over the course of the year.

I  want to leave you with a few other things. This budget focuses on measurable improvements in city services. 74.5 almost 75% are satisfied or very satisfied with city services. We’d like that number to go up.

We have found efficiencies. Some of them are in this budget book, but I’ll draw your attention to a few. We redirected $112,000 from forestry. We are reducing the innovation fund to cover software costs by $580,000 bringing in automated speed enforcement. $827,000 covered by revenues that we expect to generate. We are looking at not ignoring our reserves. There are guidelines and standards, and it comes down to our risk appetite and what our priorities are as council and as staff. Our stabilization reserves are recommended to be 10 to 15% of revenue. They’re at 6.7%

Our target for capital reserve funds should be 2% of the value of our assets; that’s $126 million I believe the replacement cost to our assets is $6.3 billion. Scott’s nodding at me, so that’s, you know, that’s, that’s a big asset value, and we are at 21.1  million. That’s not terrible, but having a dedicated capital levy that contributes to that is a responsible thing to do. We’ve included that in the budget as well.

Hassaan Basit: There is a lot of transformations under the way underway and I’m confident that this budget will do that.

This is a budget that I think is funding a lot of things. It’s funding saving for the future. It’s funding frontline improvements in services today, it’s responding to, you know, the events, the flooding events, and making those are a priority.Our property taxes make up 72% of our operating budget. We are going to be looking at how we can look at our own source revenues, our government grants to see if we can up that contribution as well. We’ve tried to work hard to ensure this year’s tax increase is as low as it can be. We’re working to demonstrate real value.There is a lot of transformations under the way underway and I’m confident that this budget will do that.