The budget committee of Chatham-Kent council broke out the brooms more so than the knives, pushing tax pressures down the road Tuesday evening.
In the opening meeting of the 2026 budget deliberations, the committee ultimately reduced the proposed tax increase to 3.96 per cent, down from its starting point of 4.92 percent.
As is habitually the case in Chatham-Kent over the years, the committee went after proposed increases to infrastructure spending. South Kent Coun. Anthony Ceccacci successfully lobbied to cull $2 million from proposed additional infrastructure spending, ultimately in two parts, $1.5 million and $500,000.
“If we look at cuts elsewhere, I think we’re going to go project to project and possibly make cuts in each other’s wards,” he said to the other councillors, adding, “This is not optimal by any means.”
Gord Quinton, chief financial officer for the municipality agreed with the latter statement.
“This will have serious impact. You’re reducing the base by $2 million, which means you won’t have it next year. Over 10 years, you’re having $20 million less to build things,” he said.
This comes on top of additional spending cuts the past two years that will leave the municipality short $73 million annually in 10 years’ time when combined with Tuesday’s decision.
West Kent Coun. Melissa Harrigan said it hurts, but it’s something that should not affect one ward more than the others.
“This impacts all of Chatham-Kent equally,” she said.
Edward Soldo, general manager of infrastructure and engineering, said the impact for 2026 will be modest, as his team will go after “low-hanging fruit,” but big projects will be affected down the road.
South Kent Coun. Ryan Doyle agreed with Ceccacci’s proposal.
“If we are going to do a big ask, I think that’s the right place to take it from,” he said.
Ceccacci then suggested taking money from reserves to bring dust suppressant for rural roads back online.
After voting it out last budget, the budget committee opted to bring it back – surgically. Next year, dust suppressant will be applied for 100-metre stretches of gravel roadway in front of rural residences and at gravel intersections.
The cost from reserves is $550,000, but has no impact on next year’s budget.
Ceccacci followed up that effort with a proposal to increase landfill hosting fees to $200,000 annually, something the municipality is already achieving, but had not budgeted for.
Those decisions left the committee at the 3.96 per cent mark in terms of an increase in next year’s budget.
However, other councillors tried and failed to find support for savings elsewhere. Doyle led the way, seeking to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a wide range of reserve funds the municipality maintains.
Quinton said pulling $515,000 out of reserves to “buy down” the tax increase for 2026 would only put pressure on future budgets.
“We’ve always said to be very careful bringing down the tax rate with one-time reserves. We have hundreds of millions of dollars in projects in the works that need one-time money,” he said.
Doyle’s effort failed. As did several attempts to focus on specific reserves and using smaller dollar amounts.
From there, the budget committee went into closed session and will resume budget deliberations Wednesday night.
