West Perth Council is in the early stages of its 2023 budget process, but its CAO says it's likely they'll be looking at a fairly significant tax increase this year.
Jeff Brick says they began the budget process back in December, and often staff present an initial draft of what is needed to operate the organization and that was done January 30. Brick says quite often the first draft can come in with a high tax number, and the initial draft has an increase of 12 per cent.
"We had warned council in the last two budget years that we had some high numbers coming, and we went with a couple of low percentage budgets in 2021 and 22, so this 12 percent has kind of caught up to us. But, I expect that with some prioritization it may come down a bit," Brick stated.
Brick says the next step includes a meeting on February 21.
"So another meeting on February 21 where we're bringing back the status of our West Perth reserves, and we've got a number of questions where council has asked for additional information. Following that, we anticipate we can bring the budget to council for approval as early as March 6," added Brick.
With three meetings available in March, Brick notes that they could also delay the final budget approval if need be until the March 20 or 27 meetings.
"Some of the reasons for the delay are we need slightly better year end numbers from 2022, we just haven't closed our year end yet, so that's always part of the delay for getting our final budget approval. We also need to get the number from the County of Perth and what their budget number's going to be," Brick concluded.