City Council spent today deliberating on the budget for 2021, there were several updates made to the multi-year budget plan most notably, a new investment into the city’s film industry. This is the right time for the city to break into the film industry as a filming location as the pandemic has paused film production.
“Now that there’s not been a lot of production going on, there’s been a lot of writing taken place.”
The council passed an amendment to hire a spokesperson for the city with industry experience to advertise the city to film makers, as well as an assistant. For this, the city has set aside $300,000 in the economic development reserve fund for hiring these positions as well as a budget for expenses.
They also explored pivoting the city’s Downtown Core Area Action Plan that used to focus on identifying problems that hinder London’s downtown core’s success, to focus more on how it can help the area with COVID recovery.
Councilor Jesse Helmer spoke on this at the deliberation:
“Leaving the money there and letting the program pivot to something that can help with COVID recovery. There’s been a lot of ideas from local businesses around the core on how they can recover from the pandemic and those ideas are going to need funding.”
Another major topic was attempting to lower tax rates for citizens, the current rate is at 4.4% for this year and next but will drop to 3.4% in 2021 and 3.3% in 2022. Councilor Shawn Lewis said that they may not be able to drop it moving forward.
“I wanted to see if there was anything, we could do to lower the rate for our citizens, and I didn’t come up with much to be honest. So many of the investments we are making here are critical.”
Council was able to get through the budget before the meeting was adjourned at 3:30 today.
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