(File photo/battlefordsNOW staff)

By Angela Brown

Financial Focus

City says finding efficiences helps it weather the impact of COVID-19

Jul 14, 2020 | 5:29 PM

The City of North Battleford continues to look to reduce costs where possible and be financially prudent in light of the COVID-19 impact.

According to administration, the city is focusing its efforts on managing the city’s assets and defining levels of service, while being cost efficient.

“The city is in a reasonably good financial position considering the effect of the pandemic,” Mayor Ryan Bater said. “That effect has been quite dramatic on a number of municipalities. When the pandemic began we did identify a number of areas where we expected to see a loss in revenue. The most obvious was revenues related to recreation.”

With facility closures, the mayor said, the city was no longer collecting fees at the door. As well all major events were cancelled so there was a loss of rental revenue there also.

He said the city acted quickly in reducing its operating expenses related to recreation, which resulted in the temporary layoff of a number of city employees.

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“Most of those employees are now coming back to work,” Bater said. “Of course we are now opening up our recreation facilities, so we do expect some revenues to start coming back.”

Finance Director Steve Brown said in his recent report to council despite the challenges, on the positive side the city still has some “wiggle room” financially.

He said the city is just getting into the “outer edge of the fiscal storm,” but he thinks it still has some “pain on the horizon yet to come.”

Brown said the city had to temporarily lay off some staff starting at the end of March when the province’s COVID-19 restrictions went into effect and a number of city facilities temporarily closed as a result.

The city treated the situation as a business might, he said, to manage cash flow.

Both the city’s revenues and expenses have seen a decline from the impact of the pandemic.

Total wages are forecast to be down by $1,251,863 for the year for several factors including a reduction in casual and part-time staff and temporary layoffs.

Utilities revenues are trending downwards due to lower usage from reduced demand. The city’s new forecast estimates this revenue will be $220,000 less than budgeted for 2020.

Recreation revenues are expected to be down for the year by $492,240 due to facility closures from April to August.

Due to the impact of COVID-19, overall revenues for the city for 2020 are now forecast to be $781,701 less than budgeted. But expenses are forecast to be down further, by $1,435,635 from budgeted. So the overall net savings now forecast for the year is estimated at $653,884.

The city anticipates it will see reduced funding from the Municipal Revenue Sharing Program due to negative impact from the pandemic on the provincial economy.

Another challenge ahead for the city will be potential increases in costs related to anticipated RCMP policing contract negotiations in the next two years.

The mayor said fortunately the city has been financially frugal in the past couple of years which has helped put it in a healthy position before the pandemic started.

“The city is in a reasonably strong financial position,” he said. “This is not only because of the measures we took at the beginning of the pandemic. It is also because of the measures we took a year and a half ago, which include the finding of efficiencies throughout 2019 and 2020. This effort is ongoing. Administration and council were able to find half a million dollars in operating efficiencies last year, and the target this year is $250,000 [in savings].”

The mayor said these are significant changes with a focus on finance.

“I can say with confidence that we would not be in the reasonably strong financial position we are in now had we not taken that action a year and a half ago,” Bater said.

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW