At this week’s committee of the whole meeting, Langford city council was presented with four options that would lower the current proposed 15.13% property tax increase for 2026.
City staff were asked in early December of last year to come back with options to reduce this tax increase to 11%, 9%, 6% or 3%.
Any of these options would see programs and services cut or have funding reduced from the 2026–2030 Financial Plan.
Staff have now presented on each of these reduction options, detailing how each reduction would impact the City’s range of services.
“Any reduction to the proposed tax increase comes with trade-offs that could affect City services and future property tax increases, which is why community input is so important,” says Scott Goodmanson, Mayor of Langford.
“We want residents to weigh in on how far the reductions should go, so Council can strike the right balance for the community.”
For context, if council was to reduce the tax increase to 11%, they would need to cut nearly $2.57 million from the current 2026 Draft Financial Plan. The lowest tax increase option would have council cut around $7.55 million from the budget.
Staff said in their presentation that the 11% option would see 16 reductions made to the budget, 9% would see 34 reductions, 6% would see 46 reductions and 3% would see a total of 53 reductions.
For the 11% option, some services would be cut in their entirety, including Langford’s wayfinding initiative, the e-bike rebate, the garbage can retrofit and the placemaking strategy.
The 9% option would see further reductions to many services. Some additional services that would be cut in their entirety include IT consulting, fountain maintenance, chamber of commerce funding and IT supplies.
Another notable cut would be for the West Shore RCMP to have two of four new-hire officers cut from the budget, saving over $427,000.
The 6% option would also see the Bear Mountain Parkway temporary power use issue cut in its entirety, along with RCMP municipal employee staffing, parks consulting, official community plan consulting and the holiday decoration budget.
And finally, the 3% option would see all West Shore RCMP new hires cut from the budget.
Additionally, eight city hall staffing positions, an increase to garbage pickup, Starlight Stadium security, ‘greening the downtown core’ and the storm drainage budget would be fully cut from the budget.
Those are just the line items of the Draft Financial Plan that would be cut by 100%. Many other services would be impacted by these tax increase reduction options.
Property tax increases over the last five years in Langford have been 2.95% in 2021, 2.95% in 2022, 12.41% in 2023, 15.63% in 2024 and 9.77% in 2025.
A detailed report on how all four options will impact services will be made available to the public on Friday, February 13th.
According to the City, Langford residents will have many opportunities to provide input on what they would like to see kept in the budget by attending upcoming meetings, either online or in-person.
Residents can also send in an email to council or fill out an online survey that closes on March 4th.
Results from this survey will be summarized and presented to city council at the March 17th, meeting.
The next budget meeting will be held on Thursday, February 19th.
