OLDS — The Town of Olds is very “lean” and has room to increase property taxes and hire more staff, Coun. Darren Wilson says.
That advice came from outside consultants, Wilson said during an interview with the Albertan.
He said he was responding to questions he gets from residents “around the organization and efficiency and everything else.”
Wilson said in 2022, a total cost-of-residency analysis involving eight other comparable communities, including property tax rates, utility costs and franchise fees (revenue obtained from utility providers for the right to sell their products within a municipality) was conducted.
It found that Olds ranked in the bottom three of those eight communities. In other words, its total residency cost was lower than five other comparable communities.
In fact, said Wilson, “when we had the outside consultant study done, their recommendation was we have room to move on property taxes.
“If we want to achieve sustainability, we should be looking to increase property taxes, relative to our peers, relative to our comparators.”
He said the Town of Olds was found to be “lean” when it came to the number of employees it has.
In fact, Wilson said it was found that the municipality “could and should” hire one or two more employees in its operations department.
That department includes public works and utilities, engineering, planning and development as well as parks and sports fields.
“From 2021 to basically today, the FTE (full-time equivalent) person count at the Town (of Olds) has actually gone down,” Wilson said.
“When we did some of our benchmarkings, specifically the outside third-party review in 2022, we found that we are a very lean organization.
“And there are pockets within the town (where) we could and should be looking to hire; some of those being on the operations side.
“We are a lean organization. We’re not bloated with human resource capital.”
