Letter to the Editor

I see it is the time when Cranbrook city council begins looking forward to budget planning. The city is asking citizens for input by completing a survey related to the 2026 budget.

I encourage everyone to take the time to complete this survey and provide your honest feedback to the city to assist council in moving forward.

Before completing the survey, I did some background research related to the city’s past residential tax increases and the city’s increased staffing expenditures.

Our residential taxes have increased 25.69% over the past five years (2021 – 2.35%, 2022 – 2.75%, 2023 – 5.87%, 2024 – 8.32%, 2025 – 6.4%).

Reviewing the city’s Statement of Financial Information (SOFI) for 2020 compared to 2024 I was overwhelmed by the increase in city staff remuneration.

You can check this out by searching “Cranbrook SOFI 2020” or choose any year.  This is what I found:

2020 Employee Remuneration – $12,945,394;

2024 Employee Remuneration – $18,894,973.

Wow; an increase of $5,949,579 (31.4 %) over four years.

I share this public information with the hope that our council focuses on these huge increases before asking the residents to cough up another tax increase this year.  I appreciate that there is transparency about our city finances, so we understand where our tax dollars are being spent.

Douglas McLachlan,

Cranbrook

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