Tuesday Winkler city council and senior administration began the process of looking ahead to 2025 with its annual fall planning session taking place.
"This is the very beginning of our annual budgetary planning conversations," explained Mayor Henry Siemens. "We get together with the city manager, and all of the directors, and we talk about all of our capital plans for the year. Staff presents some of the things they're working on. We provide some direction in terms of where that's going. They take that back, and then go build the actual financial plan. That includes operations and maintenance."
After that takes place, the group will get together again in January to finalize the financial plan for the next fiscal year.
Goal is to create multi-year plan
Siemens noted new to the process this time around is the goal of having a multi-year financial plan in place by the end of the process. He added they have been talking about taking this approach for a while, and now are moving ahead with it.
"Our intention this year, coming out of January, is we're going to have a three-year financial plan," he explained. "It will allow some additional ability for our staff to plan for the future, and also for us to be able to take some of the projects that are necessary, but hopefully we can defer a little bit to make sure we're the absolute best stewards of those dollars, so when we go back to the community and ask them to fund this, it's able to be done in an affordable manner."
Siemens made the comments for In the Mayors Chair, which you can listen to in full, below.