Residents of the town of Fort Frances will be paying more for services and seeing higher water and sewer rates next year as the town works to establish its various budgets for 2025.
The rates were discussed and approved at Monday night’s meeting of town council, where administration presented two reports detailing the planned increase. The reports proposed that most user fees would see an increase of 2.1 percent, while residential sewer and water rates would receive an increase at 2.25 percent, and institutional rates would be increased by 3.25.
When discussing next year’s user fees within the Town of Fort Frances, the report prepared by Town Treasurer Dawn Galusha notes that not every fee charged by the town would increase, but some of the fees that will see an increase in 2025 include business licenses (e.g. hairstyling shop increasing to $55.75 from $54.60), letters of compliance or approval for properties ($88.30 from $86.50), building/demolition permits (e.g. Residential construction – new and/or addition – Main Floor increasing to $1.00 per square foot from $0.95 per square foot), some landfill rates (e.g. rate per tonne when scale is in operation increasing to $84.55 from $82.79), and community services like Memorial Sports Centre ice rental rates.
Discussion also turned to non-resident rates for town facilities, which were once in place but were removed during the previous council’s term. Coun. Mike Behan, responding to a comment from coun. Wendy Brunetta around the possibility of revisiting those rates in order to drive revenue for the town, noted that as a member of the committee that made the decision, the rates were in fact removed for exactly that purpose.
“My reasoning for supporting at the time was to actually increase revenue because of the law diminishing returns,” Behan said.
“The more expensive something gets, you don’t necessarily get that back, and it might actually lose revenue. So the thought process, to me, was if more non-residents joined the Sportsplex as members, or whichever, we actually might raise more money, which in turn would actually reduce the amount that taxpayer had to subsidize these programs and facilities. That was my thinking, it was sort of outside the box at the time, but we wanted to see if there was some way to raise revenue, not decrease revenue.”
Behan noted that the idea was presented as something of a pilot project, though it was complicated by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that he was open to looking at the revenue generated now without the non-resident fees to see if that idea had borne fruit. Coun. Steve Maki echoed Behan’s point, saying he would also be in favour of extending the non-resident fee removal as a pilot project to determine its impact on facility revenue, to which Brunetta agreed.
“That’s basically the point I was trying to make is that I’d like to see some facts and figures,” she said.
“I’d like to know if it did, in fact, increase our membership, and I accept the fact that COVID put a real dent into what information we could collect. If we’re not going to look at it this budget cycle, I’d like to at least have some information in the next budget cycle so we can actually use facts to support our decision.”
Galusha noted there might be some challenge in pulling data that will be useful, as outdated usage numbers from 2019 would be difficult to compare to today’s or even next year’s fees, though Fort Frances mayor Andrew Hallikas expressed his confidence in administrations capabilities.
Council requested a report on the non-resident user fees be prepared for Q2 2025.
As discussion turned to water and sewer rates in Fort Frances, council reviewed a report from operations and facilities manager Travis Rob that recommended the aforementioned changes to the fee structure, noting the increase would see a 2.24 rate increase for flat rate residential customers that would bring the 2025 total to $1149 for the year, up from $1123.80 per year in 2024, which would equate to an increase of $25.50 per year or $2.10 per month. The fee updates would also set the volumetric rate at $3.89 per cubic meter, or a 3.77 percent increase for Industrial / Commercial class. Overall, the proposed changes would see an increase of $178,197.78 in revenue for the town compared to the 2024 forecasted revenue “which results in a deficit of $11.22 from the forecasted revenue of $6,239,162.00 given the forecasted 2024 consumption,” according to Rob’s report.
Speaking to council, the operations and facilities manager noted much of the difficulty in setting these rates comes down to trying to estimate what the annual consumption is going to be, which changes from year to year, especially when trying to plan for saving money in the respective reserve funds.
“We use the previous year’s consumption as kind of a guide for us moving forward,” Rob explained.
“So we really lean back heavily on our financial plan, and our financial plan does take into account not only the assets that we have, the value of those assets, the age of those assets, and the conditions of those assets. So the financial plan is really establishing that percentage increase or that revenue component with contemplated large capital works in mind. We talked a little bit about it at the capital budget meeting. All of our infrastructure, you know, linear and otherwise is old. It’s reaching end of life… But we we fully acknowledge that this is a big year in terms of capital cost. Does that mean we need to try and recuperate some of that reserve contribution this year? I mean, that’s really up to the will of Council. We do still have fairly healthy sewer and water reserves, even with the expenditures that that we have.”
Rob noted the town has worked to put away roughly $25,000 per year in extra money to help support the reserves, and thus any future projects that may be larger and more costly in scope. It has also been working to incrementally close the gap between the residential and ICI (industrial, commercial and institutional) water and wastewater rates.
Council ultimately approved the recommended water and sewer fee changes, with all approved rate and fee changes expected to come into effect January 1, 2025.
The complete reports detailing all proposed user fee and water and sewer rate changes can be viewed on the Town of Fort Frances’ website included on the agenda for Monday night’s meeting.
