Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, budget requests

The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo has started hearing budget requests in an attempt to determine how to use the small budget to fund numerous projects. The budget hearing was held Tuesday, and the councilors were briefed on the finances of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo before the hearing started. There are several projects who are all rated at the same priority level, and that makes it harder to allocate the available resources in the best way possible. Fort MacMurray Mayor Melissa Blake said “Going forward, council is going to have some serious considerations to make. We’ve got some unassigned resource projects, which means, historically, that’s below the line, we don’t have the funding for it.” There is currently $394 million available according to Kola Oladimeji, who is the director of finance for the RMWB.

The $394 million available to the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo is not all available for budget requests though. $288 million of this has been committed already, being promised for multi year projects that have already been started. This only leaves $109 million for the council to use on new projects that are proposed. Mayor Blake commented “We’ve got three full days of budgets where we’ll receive the presentation, come to understand why the priorities have been allocated the way that they were, and then council starts the jockeying game. You juggle for position, trying to get things that are relevant and important to go above that line if necessary.” Coun. Tyran Ault stated “It’s exciting in the sense that we’re going to take a good, hard look at all of the projects that are on the books. It’s different for this municipality,. There are more projects than there is money, and some of the talk that we have endless pots of money are going to be scrutinized this time around.”