North Battleford City Hall has set aside Tuesday, Feb. 19 for a meeting on the city budget.
The meeting is to begin at 7 p.m. and will be open to the public. According to Director of Finance Matthew Hartney, the purpose of the meeting is to receive and discuss the 2013 budgets and consider a resolution to adopt the budget.
Hartney had originally proposed setting aside Feb. 13 for the meeting, but two councillors - Don Buglas and Cathy Richardson - indicated they had other commitments that evening.
The municipal services committee meeting scheduled for that night will not go ahead. Instead, City Manager Jim Toye says the items and reports from that committee meeting - which normally includes presentation of the fire report and building permit numbers - will move to the regular city council meeting the following week.
The meeting Tuesday, said Toye, is for council to "debate the final budget and put it's blessing on it."
What exactly will happen Tuesday is still a guessing game, however. While the entire utilities, operations and five-year capital budget is up for adoption by council at that meeting, Hartney did hold out the possibility that councillors could request even more changes to the budget or even put off a vote on adoption until a later meeting.
Another scenario Toye outlined to reporters is council could vote to adopt the utilities portion of the budget and give first reading to bylaws setting the water, sewer and sanitation rates, but could hold off on adopting the operations and capital budget until a later meeting.
In any event, it will be the final budget document that will be up for debate next Tuesday. Hartney told reporters a copy of the final version of the budget will be considered, complete with the revisions as directed by council during two nights of public budget deliberations held late last month.
"We're going to be changing the budget per the discussions that took place in the deliberations," said Hartney.
"There will also be additional details that council had asked about for those two nights. They were two long nights, and there were a lot of things they want to see in the final version, and that's what we're incorporating in right now."
The revised final budget is expected to include a 4.99 per cent increase in the property tax and increases of 6.9 percent each in water and sewer rates, along with various other fee changes as directed by council.
