At the Feb. 4 Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health (WDGPH) meeting the board passed its finance committee’s recommended cost-shared budget increase of 1.4%.
Total expenditures this year will reach $20,668,370, up $275,907 over last year’s budgeted expenditures of $20,392,463.
Due to a provincial funding announcement in November, there was a deficit of $155,474 at the end of 2014. This was the base for building the new 2015 budget, said Nicola Mercer, medical officer of health and CEO.
The cost-shared budget sees a 2% or $244,995 increase in provincial funding, taking the value to $12,752,501 for 2015 compared to $12,507,507 last year.
Similarly, the budget also includes a 2% or $151,387 increase in municipal funding (from $7,714,482 for 2014 to $7,865,869 this year).
Wellington County will be contributing $2,572,136 this year compared to $2,522,635 last year – an increase of $49,501. The City of Guelph and Dufferin County will be contributing $3,610,433 and $1,683,300 respectively, compared to $3,540,948 and $1,650,899 last year.
In total the three municipalities contribute 38.2% of the total WDGPH cost-shared funding. Of that 32.7% comes from Wellington County, 45.9% comes from Guelph and 21.4% comes from Dufferin County. The province contributes 61.9% of health unit funding.
Board member June Hofland expressed concern over where the capital budget fit in with regard to the two new building reserve funds for the Guelph and Orangeville facilities.
“The money that’s going into the capital reserves is contained in this budget,” Mercer explained. There is not a separate capital budget.
“We don’t have capital reserves, we’ve never had, that’s why when we went into the building project we had to create a way of being able to fund them,” Mercer said.
The building reserves were included in the “building occupancy” line totaling $3,002,154 for 2015.
“The remaining major unknown in the 2015 projected budget is the operation costs for the two new facilities in Guelph and Orangeville,” the budget report said. “Best estimates have been used in the creation of this budget; however the actual expected operation costs will not be able to be reliably projected until the facilities have been in operation for approximately two years.”
The cost-shared budget is a subset of the WDGPH budget and only addresses cost-shared mandatory and related programs. The programs that are 100% funded by the province are not included in this budget “because [WDGPH board members] don’t get to vote on it,” Mercer explained.
