Homeowners in Waterloo region will pay an average of $241 more on the regional portion of their tax bill next year.
Combined with the City of Cambridge 2025 budget increase, it means the average assessed homeowner in Cambridge will see a $263 increase next year. Annual increases to the education portion of the tax bill are still being assessed.
Regional council spent the morning debating its budget increase, going back and forth on ways to reduce it and finally agreeing to slash about $6.9 million from departmental expenses.
That move set the region's total 2025 operating and capital budget, including police, at $2.4 billion with a levy increase of 9.48 per cent.
The councillor who inched it towards that reduction still wasn't happy to see an increase above the levy impact target of 8 per cent, however, saying it was far above what he believed council should have aimed for.
"This budget is going to make more people homeless," said an incensed Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic. "This budget is going to make life more difficult for people in this region and I can't support it in its present form."
He asked for a deferral until staff have time to whittle it down further, calling what was presented Friday "a lump of coal."
"I don't think the residents of Waterloo region can afford what's on the table right now," Vrbanovic said
His motion to defer the budget vote until staff can get the budget increase down to a 5 or 6 per cent was defeated after council heard there would be repurcussions.
A deferral would mean a number of expenditures scheduled to start Jan. 1 wouldn't be allowed to go ahead, including expansion of the region's warming centres.
Friday's extended final budget meeting kicked off with Vrbanovic's motion from last week calling for a cross-department cap on the escalating costs of supplies, equipment, facilities maintenance, professional fees, communications, travel and rents.
After about an hour of debate, councillors voted in favour of the motion's call for the total increase to be capped at 5 per cent, resulting in an estimated overall decrease in the operating budget of $6.9 million and a net reduction on the tax levy of $2.4 million.
Council later voted to ask staff to table a report detailing where those cuts will be made, pending council approval.
Coun. Rob Deutschmann didn't support a cap on departmental expenses more in line with inflation, saying the "basket of goods" the region is working with is different than the cost of living increases impacting the average resident.
"I'm not prepared to ask staff to further reduce at this time, to take a sledgehammer to services," he said.
He questioned how Vrbanovic allowed the police budget to go through with an over 8 per cent increase without contesting it.
"We as a region did not act the same with all our departments," Deutschmann said.
"To suggest staff has not been doing heavy lifting? All you've got to do is close your eyes and think about the past five months."
The region's commissioner of corporate services Wayne Steffler was in agreement, saying staff has already done a "thorough review" of all departments, specifically looking where increases came in over 5 per cent.
To bring it down the "level of magnitude" requested in the motion, he said staff would undoubtedly have to look at further service level reductions.
After learning the amount Vrbanovic was asking for amounted to around a 1 per cent reduction, or $25 for the average homeowner, Coun. Pam Wolf called for some perspective.
"For $20 we're looking at a huge reduction in service," she said. "The people who are paying property tax have property. The people whose services we're cutting generally don't have property, so we're hurting our most vulnerable people."
If someone can't pay another $20 on their property taxes and it causes them to sell their house, it's not the $20 increase, it's because they lost their job, she said. Even if they sell their house at a reduced rate, they'll have thousands of dollars and won't be on the street. The same can't be said of people who are renting and struggling to make ends meet.
"This is not the time to cut services and a lot of the services we're looking at here have to do with our affordable housing stock," she continued, urging councillors around the horseshoe not to support the motion.
Deutschmann admonished councillors who believe they know better when they haven't visited Waterloo Region Housing sites in their cities to see the state they're in.
The region's interim CAO Mathieu Goetzke confirmed a lot of the maintenance contracts where service cuts would have to be considered are for affordable housing units, which represent about 60 per cent of the facilities the region has to maintain.
Leaky windows won't get repaired, he said. Preventative maintenance would be sidelined, threatening the condition of the units.
Knowing that, Regional Chair Karen Redman said she wouldn't support the motion, saying line-by-line scrutiny of the budget has happened several times over the last few months.
"We've had many many opportunities...I think we've arrived at a fair result that I'm happy to take to the community," she said.
Coun. Doug Craig agreed with the motion, however. "All councillor Vrbanovic is doing is saying we should be more involved with what's going on."
He and Cambridge Mayor Jan Liggett, who also supported the motion, were critical of anyone using the words "most vulnerable" to generate support for its rejection.
"I think we need to stop using that word, because every single person in society today is vulnerable to what we do around this horseshoe," Liggett said.
She reminded council that Cambridge has 6,400 unpaid tax accounts this year and supported Craig's assessment that "homeowners are vulnerable too in many situations, not just in budgets and taxes, but also with community safety, which has not really been addressed properly."
The notion that upper levels of government are failing to address some of the biggest problems affecting next year's budget, including homelessness and affordable housing, wasn't far from the minds of all councillors.
"The provincial government is failing municipalities right now. They are abdicating their role of assisting us in ensuring we have sufficient funding to deal with the issues," Deutschmann said before the final council vote. "This budget is a reflection of that."
Vrbanovic's second motion called for a 1 per cent reduction in next year's capital budget, which staff pointed out has already been cut considerably since its first draft.
Kicking projects down the road reduced the budget by about $2 million after council called for an 8 per cent budget target in July, Steffler said.
That came after projects were already slashed from the first draft of the capital budget. Cuts were made to the tune of $41.5 million in transportation, $21 million in housing services, $4.1 million for the airport, $16.2 million in transit, $10 million in water and $10.6 million in wastewater.
"So this could impact our ability to keep up with the growth that we all want to see happen," Redman stated.
Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe moved to defer the motion until staff can table an asset management review in February and a request that debentures be considered for some of the projects.
Vrbanovic said unless McCabe's motion includes deferral of the budget, he wouldn't support a deferral.
Deutschmann then suggested deferring the motion to the 2026 budget, saying he doesn't have enough information about the impacts the requested reduction could have on planned work for critical infrastructure.
That deferral carried.
Next came the adoption of new user fees, which will see inflationary increases across the board in areas like senior services, children's services, housing services and the planning department. Some fees, like room rentals in facilities, will remain static or see a slight decrease.
Starting in July, Grand River Transit will offer its EasyGO fare card for $4 instead of $5, incentivizing more riders to get on board the pre-paid card service. Single rides using EasyGo will remain at $3 while cash fares will jump from $3.75 to $4.
Monthly pases will rise from $96 to $100 as proposed.
