When the Salt Spring Island Fire Protection District opens its doors for a budget town hall on Sept. 8, trustees and staff will be presenting the smallest increase in budget — and appurtenant taxes — in years.
The district is looking at a 6.9 per cent overall hike, and while that still means a budget topping $6 million, draft budget documents are showing efforts Salt Spring’s budget hawks will likely find encouraging: holding administration costs to a two per cent bump, less than the speed of inflation; setting wage increases at 2.7 per cent for next year, although preparing for the potential of 5 per cent in future years; and holding operations at a 3.9 per cent rise, again modest even as the cost of vehicle and hydrant maintenance rises.
Slipped inside the budget package is a colourful page of fire apparatus, and a list of dates when they’ll need to be replaced. The march of time is inevitable, and the importance of safe and effective equipment is difficult to overstate, as is the likelihood that the trucks aren’t going to get any cheaper in the future.
One big knock down in the budget is, counterintuitively, related to the new fire hall: there’s no need to keep feeding reserves every year to plan for a future build, because it’s happening as we speak. Of course, in one sense that annual expenditure is being replaced with the cost to service a mortgage.
The district is also embarking on a multi-year plan to increase capital building reserves again, this time to fund the eventual relocation of Fire Hall No. 3 to somewhere presumably slightly more northerly than its current spot at Central — a five-year plan that envisions the new satellite hall operational by 2030. Trustees seem well focused this year on choosing and acquiring the right piece of land.
Planning the next fire hall before the paint is dry — or frankly even applied — to the current one is prudent; keeping a tighter rein on ratepayers’ costs is a bonus. Fire district budget town halls are the perfect opportunity to listen in — and sound off — on the future of Salt Spring’s fire protection plans, and we recommend attending.