Council Preview / 2026 Operating Budget
By John Swartz
Orillia council meets Monday, October 27 at 9 a.m. to tackle the 2026 operating budget. Part of the operating budget procedure is to have representatives from various boards and committees appear to defend their 2025 budget performance and justify increases or additional spending of a capital nature (which will have already been dealt with during the capital budget deliberations).
The broad stroke is the budget Mayor Don McIsaac is presenting indicates there will be At least a 1.52% increase on tax bills, if the budget stands at the end of the day, and subsequent amendments proposed by councillors do not add to the bottom line total.
If nothing changes property tax payers can expect an extra $21 per $100K of assessed value added to their tax bill.
The City is expecting to add $1 million of tax levy revenue from new properties joining the mix because of development. That said, the overall budget is increasing by $2.2 million, but only $1.2 million will hit the levy because of the new assessments added. Some good news, the province is sticking with their pause on property assessments, which are still at 2016 levels. when catching up happens it’s going to quite the experience.
Last year council opted to take $816K from the tax rate stabilization reserve to keep the tax levy increase down. The thing is, it does not carry forward and the cost of operating of the City has not been reduced, so that’s like having an extra $816K added to this year’s budget. The city’s treasurer, John Henry, states in his overview report, if council had not dipped into the reserve last year this year’s increase would be .45% instead of 1.52%
An interesting paragraph relates to speed camera revenue. Henry said at one point staff had trimmed their requests so much the added revenue from speeding tickets brought the budget to a negative increase position. However, with the province maybe eliminating speed cameras the City will not get $2 million in net revenue they had been working with for budget projections. They were calculating $2.5 million for revenue of which $465K would pay for the cameras and operating costs. But it’s about safety, not revenue.
The City spends 58% of the budget on labour, 26% goes to reserves (which mostly ends up as capital spending), and 16% is classified as other spending.
Part of the ‘other’ expenses is $3.3 million of payments against borrowing to pay for the Jarvis Street, upgrading the Fittons West sewage pumping station and design costs for a new transit terminal. Missing from the loan coasts are payments for Centennial Drive and Laclie Street reconstruction.
The report states most of the City’s revenue not from property taxes is from fees (user charges and permits), 54%. Investment income fell by 46% to $1.45 million mostly because Bank of Canada rates are falling.
A number of things have come up during the year at council and passed as referrals to the 2026 budget, 9 of which are included in the 2026 budget, leaving 6 items for council to debate at this time. Four of those will hit the tax levy if they get included; they are: a working poor transit subsidy pilot project, the hospital reserve contribution, a request for financial assistance to the Orillia Native Women’s Group, and recommendations from the winter control policy working group. Two more items, a sewage backflow rebate program and a hard water rebate could result in higher water bills.
There is little change for most of the committees and agencies the City contributes to, except for a $25K increase requested by Information Orillia, and an $8K increase to ‘community contributions’ (there is no indication of what that means).
Board members of Information Orillia made a deputation to council earlier in October to outline how their new board plans to stabilize their funding by making partnerships with other groups for service delivery, but that will incur some extra expense in the mean time. Whether the extra $25K will be an ongoing part of their budget isn’t clear. They also, because of some incidents have decided they can no longer staff their office in the Orillia Public Library building with only one person..
The City will pay $3 million ($62K more than last year) of the Orillia Public Library’s budget of $3.4 million.
Regarding last week’s capital budget meeting, there were motions to adopt the budget and for the mayor to waive veto of any additions council proposed and passed.
Council meetings are open to the public or can be watched on the City’s Youtube channel.
(Photos by Swartz – SUNonline/Orillia)
