Council pushes back 2013 budget calendar

City council won’t discuss when to start looking at the 2013 budget until next week.

Council at Monday night’s meeting voted to push back the proposed dates to start looking at this year’s budget. The budget package including tax fact sheets were proposed to begin on Jan. 31 followed by the community handbook and the budget itself being available online on Feb. 4.

But McIntyre Coun. Trevor Giertuga took issue with the dates.

He said he wouldn’t be able to make the majority of the meetings during February because and would only be available for the ratification vote on March 11.

“I went from only missing a couple of meetings to pretty much missing it all,” he said.

Couns. Mark Bentz and Linda Rydholm both agreed that they shouldn’t move ahead if one councillor is going to be missing the majority of the meetings.

Bentz said the reason for the revised schedule was to accommodate as many people as possible.

“I know it is hard to schedule 13 people,” Bentz said. “But I am certainly not happy with one member not being able to participate. I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

In other business, council voted in favour of taking the proposed John Street Road Bell Communication Tower off the outstanding items list. The reason for the decision was that Bell decided to move to a new location on Louis Street.

Mark Smith, the city’s general manager of development services, said the company will still need to go through proper consultation before a decision is made.

Also at that meeting, council voted to amend a by-law to allow for additional residential unit at the former Riverdale school building. The amendment will allow for one of the four to be converted into two separate units.