Parry Sounds ~ Ideas and Opinions, In and Around Parry Sound

There are no notes. I was stuck in Dallas when my flight to Toronto was cancelled. But there is good news, the Town has started posting the draft budget items online. They prefer that I simply link to their documents rather than post them on this site. That’s fair enough. Here is the link to those documents, it’s about 9 MB and I think you can figure out which is the Draft 2014 Budget link. It downloads as a PDF document.

A couple of pointers for reading the budget document:

1. It’s really the first eight pages that are the most interesting. These pages provide a quick look at the unfinanced capital outlay (first page) and ‘wish list’ for 2014 (pages 1 to 7, as labelled in the top right corner).
2. These figures were the subject of last Tuesday’s discussion and it’s not clear what items were eliminated at that meeting. I’ll be able to tell once I have a copy of the revised draft of the budget, and see what has been removed from the list. So don’t get worked up about any of the line items that you think are unreasonable as Council may have already ‘nuked’ them.

Items that are worth noting are:

1. An apparent proposal to take $2.5MM of the Parry Sound Hydro merger proceeds (~$4MM) and put it into a reserve for future capital. There is also a suggested $650K down payment on the Stockey Centre outstanding capital cost.
2. The Stockey Centre needs $160K in roof repairs. The BOCC needs $150K in roof repairs. (Can’t anyone build a roof properly? Both roofs are less than 15 years old.)
3. A new pedestrian signal for James Street is proposed at a cost of $125K. (Is anyone else surprised by this cost?)
4. The new aerial truck for the fire department is in for $1.1MM (depending on the CDN/US dollar exchange rate).
5. $235K for a repair of the fire hall retaining wall. (Once again, can’t things be done properly the first time?)
6. Upgrades related to the new school will cost on the order of $450K. But I’m glad to see that Seguin is able to reduce their tax rates. They have Parry Sound to shoulder the cost of necessary school infrastructure. Let’s see what happens to OPP policing costs, there was a nice article in today’s Beacon Star on this subject.

There is more but these are a few of the bigger ticket items that jumped out at me. There are more big dollar items such as the Forest Street project, but these are part of an ongoing program of infrastructure upgrades and don’t represent anything we didn’t know was coming.

Still on the Trail (Parry Sound’s North Shore Rugged Trail)
(Parry Sound in Black & White)