Mansfield Mayor and DG discuss 2023 budget
Mansfield Mayor and DG discuss 2023 budget
Over the past few weeks the municipal councils across the Pontiac have developed their budgets for 2023. CHIP 101.9 will be discussing with officials about the process of developing these documents within the realities of their municipalities. First up is Mansfield-et-Pontefract Mayor Sandra Armstrong and DG Éric Rochon.
Armstrong explained that the first order of business is to calculate the share of funds directed to the MRC, as well as the allocation for the services of the local Sûreté du Québec detachment. Armstrong said that this year the allocation increased significantly, noting that of their $4 million budget, nearly $700,000 went to these two items alone.
“To talk about the MRC, it’s things like the engineering department with the person who is the engineering director at the MRC. So if we need service, that’s part of it,” she explained (translated). “All the evaluations … it starts from the water, therefore, the bills, when the people working there, it comes to help pay for these services. Yes, so, for the Municipality of Mansfield and all the others too, they pay their part there … We are at around $220,000 just for the services of the Sûreté du Québec. If we add that to our bill at the MRC, pretty soon we are at more than $700,000 from our budget, our income in Mansfield, that we have to pay for these two big services.”
The general management submits a budget scenario which is then discussed within the municipal council. During the discussions, the municipal councillors establish the priorities for the next year. Often, as is the case this year for Mansfield-et-Pontefract, certain projects are postponed to the following year due to the lack of financial resources.
“I’ll start with the most simple, it’s the changing of our streetlights, everywhere a bit, to LEDs, but we had to put that … What we continue to do is to have them changed or repaired for the moment,” Armstrong said (translated). “We changed contractors for that, we ended up with a man from Chapeau. It’s going pretty well, you know, we send a text message, two days later it’s fixed or it’s changed. So, that’s it, the other projects, I’m going to let Éric continue what we left out.”
“It is certain that there, currently, as the mayor said, we have increased a little for roads and streets, but there are big investments to be made on our roads,” Rochon said (translated). “It’s easy to understand that we have chemin de la Chute, which which has needed doing for too long. This is one of the projects we are already working on, but it all depends on whether we can get other grants. We may be able to go faster, but there are many of these projects that are being sidelined. There are many of these roads that are to be done. The big priority is in there. But, as the mayor said, the municipal offices and the garage/fire station are projects, but they are not projects that I believe would be feasible in 2023. So it is likely that they will be the big priorities for 2024.”
The full interview with both Armstrong and Rochon is available here.
