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The cost of a bus or train ride will rise next year, all taxpayers will pay more toward OC Transpo and students will get less of a discount under the City of Ottawa’s $4.98-billion 2025 draft budget, which calls for an overall property tax increase of 3.9 per cent for most homes.
In September, council backed Sutcliffe’s target of holding the 2025 tax increase to 2.9 per cent, excluding the cost of transit.
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In the first two years of his term, the mayor was successful in keeping a campaign promise to hold tax increases to 2.5 per cent in 2023 and 2024. But the soaring cost of transit, fueled in part by pandemic-related delays and cost increase, as well as a drastic drop in ridership, made a higher tax hike all but invevitable this year.
The measures “are not decisions we took lightly, but are necessary,” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said Wednesday as he introduced a draft budget that he called “a balanced and responsible way forward.”
The five per cent fare increase will hike an adult fare by about 19 cents, while the eight per cent hike in the transit levy will add an extra one per cent increase in property tax bills, above the agreed-to 2.9 per cent hike.
The transit increase is needed to meet the $120 million operating deficit OC Transpo faces next year, Sutcliffe said. OC Transpo will cost $856 million next year, an $88 million increase from 2024. There will be no service cuts, he said.
Public transit is the gaping hole in the city’s budget, but is also one of Sutcliffe’s “core priorities” for city spending.
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Another is public safety, and the draft budget includes funding for 50 new police employees (22 of them sworn officers), 23 new paramedics, another 22 firefighters and 10 bylaw enforcement officers.
“There is nothing more important than emergency services being available when our residents need them,” Sutcliffe said, in a pre-meeting briefing to reporters at City Hall.
The city is also spending $104 million on roads and sidewalks, another core priority, he said. There’s money for upgrades to Brian Coburn Boulevard in the east and Carp Road in the west, as well as funding for more traffic signals at busy intersections that don’t yet have them.
There is more money for housing and $30 million to support more than 100 non-profit social service agencies.
The mayor also touted some $208 million in savings and efficiencies in city spending.
Since the summer, Sutcliffe has been lobbying for money from the federal and provincial government through his “Fairness for Ottawa” campaign — so far with limited success.
The transit budget includes a $36-million “placeholder” that Sutcliffe hopes will be money coming from higher levels of government.
“Obviously I’m not standing here with cheques from the other two levels of government,” he said. “I can tell you, however, that we are making progress. I hope there will be more news in the coming weeks.”
That help is “absolutely critical” for the city, Sutcliffe said.
Budget deliberations will continue over the next month at the committee level with the final budget coming to council for approval on Dec. 11.
More to come….
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