Consultants for the City of St. Catharines are encouraging Council to look at ways to increase user fees to bring them more in line with rates in comparable municipalities, which could bring in about $7.5 million per year in additional revenue.
That’s according to a presentation that was made to Council by Blackline Consulting on Aug. 11.
Blackline Consulting was hired to undertake a review of St. Catharines’ core services, but a specific appearance was made by Abdel Al-Sharif, Blackline Consulting’s engagement manager, to speak about ways to, among other things, bring in more revenue without turning to even higher property taxes.
“We found through our research that if you were to equalize some of your user fees, there’s up to $7.5 million on the table, and it’s at your discretion how much of that you want to capture,” said Al-Sharif.
The overall report focuses on making city services more sustainable, while prioritizing taxpayer affordability. Blackline Consulting’s report identifies 10 specific opportunities to improve services and create efficiencies.
These opportunities include improving city department collaboration by standardizing feedback and improving data access; allocating staff time to capital budgets and using a prioritization framework; increasing user fees for services where St. Catharines charges below market; enhancing by-law enforcement services; and modernizing customer service.
Another key recommendation includes developing a user fee and cost recovery framework throughout the city. The idea here is to determine how much of the overall cost of a service should be funded by user fees versus how much should come out of the tax till.
This would be part of the calculus in raising user fees to try to bring in more overall revenue.
Mayor Mat Siscoe weighed in on the report.
“In going through this process, a lot of us were hoping to identify ways where we could lessen the burden on the taxpayer,” said Siscoe.
Given those hopes, Siscoe felt the report itself offered some promising routes in pursuing that aim. Siscoe also suggested that the city should act relatively quickly in trying to implement some of the recommendations surrounding user fees, in order to try to lessen that taxpayer burden sooner rather than later.
Siscoe pointed to user fees for developers in particular, which the report says are lower in St. Catharines than in comparative municipalities and suggested that raising those fees relatively quickly to avoid upcoming cost increases for taxpayers should be a key priority.
“I’d like to see that front-loaded,” declared Siscoe.
“I think from a Council perspective and a resident perspective, [increasing user fees] would probably be the…areas where a lot of residents would hope perhaps there might be soon tax relief coming.”
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
