Lambton County's draft 2021 budget adds up to $239.8 million with a proposed property tax hike of less than two per cent.
The amount to be raised through taxes is about $82 million.
GM of Finance Larry Palarchio told a virtual committee meeting Wednesday morning it's the lowest proposed levy increase submitted to council in the past seven years.
"The total dollar increase is 2.1 million dollars," said Palarchio. "What's required from the levy is 2.57 per cent, but because we get that assessment growth of 0.82 per cent, which is fairly high for the period that we're going through, the rate increase that's required to fund this budget is 1.75 per cent."
Palarchio said they've reduced personnel costs.
"We've really tightened the amount of position gapping that's included in this budget and we've reduced it wherever we can across several divisional budgets. We've created service efficiencies in ultimate service delivery where we reduced some public programming in areas such as cultural services and travel and training has been significantly reduced due to remote work."
Palarchio said the proposed $67 million operating budget, includes over $3 million of Safe Restart funding.
Lambton County budget deliberations are scheduled to begin March 3rd at 9 a.m.