The City of Castlegar held a public input session Tuesday evening as part of the 2017 budget process.
Senior city staff, Mayor Chernoff and all of the city councillors were on hand to discuss the budget and answer questions. Seventeen residents showed up for the meeting.
The meeting started out with a chance for the public to look at presentation posters featuring budget highlights, explanations of revenue streams and breakdowns of major budget categories.
Castlegar's director of finance Andre Buss gave the public presentation and fielded most of the questions from the audience.
During the question period, the topic that garnered the most conversation was the city's solid waste management plan. Because of the popularity and success of the yard waste collection site at the Community Complex, the program has outgrown being able to be absorbed as part of the parks budget and now must be moved to the environment health section of the budget and be planned for as a separate expense.
Director of transportation and civic works Chris Barlow explained that the program was started in response to a wide-spread problem of illegal burning, smoke complaints and dumping of yard waste in alleys, dead-end streets and other such locations resulting in wash-out problems during large storms. "We were hoping to off-set some of the costs of that damage," said Barlow.
In 2016, the program cost approximately $113,000. A majority of the costs came from renting machinery to process and chip the waste.
For 2017 the city is planning on using the money that has been saved from the implementation of the new solid waste collection program started last year to pay for the yard waste program. The $36,000 in recycling savings and the $52,000 in garbage savings from last year had been put into reserves but will be used to keep the yard waste program running as an interim measure.
For future years, the city is planning a public input process to look at how to provide and pay for the service. One proposal is to add an annual fee for this service beginning in 2018. The city will also be looking into forbidding large tree service companies from using the facility.
While there has been no revenue coming from the yard waste collection program — which sees the collected waste turned into high-quality compost — there has been some cost savings as the city uses it in its green spaces. For example, the compost was recently used for the new off-leash dog park at Millennium Park. The city has also been giving away bags of compost to residents on a specified day for the last two years. In 2016 more than 600 bags were given away.
Most participants were in favour of the program, but differed on how it should be paid for and who should be allowed to use it, with some expressing concerns that people from outside of the city were taking advantage of the free dumping.
Buss explained that the city's solid waste management program is self balancing so residents can expect to see their bills reduced in the near future to reflect the savings that has been occurring since the new program started.
In response to a question about plans for storm water collection improvements, Barlow explained that the city had applied for a grant that would have allowed for an acceleration of the 10-year plan, but was unsuccessful, so the priorities set out in the original plan will remain in place, with work on Sixth Street and Ninth Avenue taking place this year.
Several questions were asked about a $10,500 item for sending three representatives to Castlegar's sister city of Embetsu, Japan as part of the ongoing cultural exchange. The Castlegar-Embetsu sister city relationship is the longest sister city relationship with a Japanese city in all of Canada, city councillors said. Students from Castlegar and Embetsu visit each other's city on alternating years.
The Castlegar News will be featuring a more detailed break down of the budget in next week's paper.