The City of Dauphin held their 2026 Financial Plan Public Hearing last night, showcasing this year's changes to both expected revenue and expenses for the city.
One of the top notes: a 5% municipal tax increase for 2026. Sharla Griffiths, City Manager, said there were several things that led to that decision for this year, especially looking at the city's reserve fund. This year saw the City draw around $3 million from the reserve fund to help fund certain projects across the city.
"What we did is we looked at what's in those reserves, what are we wanting to do, how much can we pull from our savings accounts or reserves to make the budget work, and as everybody knows, prices are going up everywhere, and so we want to minimize the amount that we were going to increase the taxes, and we settled on a 5% increase...our reserves fluctuate up and down, year to year, based on what projects we actually get to do. So our reserves were quite healthy at the beginning of 2026, over $12 million, and drawing them down by a net $3 million still leaves $9.4 million in it, but we are looking at doing things like the Craft District, and some economic development incentives, and things like that," said Griffiths.
The financial plan included a very large increase, about 33%, in a category called "Fiscal Services". What exactly is fiscal services? Griffiths said it's a show that the city is actively investing in the community with large projects.
"Fiscal services are the capital projects, the big stuff, adding infrastructure, things like that. The biggest thing that we have for this year is the childcare facility. So a few years back now, the province announced childcare facilities for several communities in Manitoba, the City of Dauphin was one of them," said Griffiths.
With the amount of projects the city is working on this year, pulling $3 million from reserves definitely wouldn't be enough to fund all of them. After the 2026 financial plan, the city has around $10.6 million of debt from borrowing. Griffiths said that, especially when it's for community investment, debt isn't always a bad thing for the city. And when it comes to those big projects, Dauphin certainly has a good number of them.
"Debt isn't necessarily bad if it's something big that's an investment in our community, and we use our debt to fund the big projects, like big drainage and big lagoon this year...over the last couple years we've had 2 very large projects. Our lagoon project is valued at about $22 million, and the City of Dauphin is on the hook for about $13 million of that," said Griffiths.
To put this year's debt and reserves in perspective, one major project from last year was the south end drainage project, which saw Main Street South redone to improve drainage capability.
"That project was about $9 million, and we had to fund about $6 million on our own. So again, we had to do some of our own money from our reserves, and some borrowing for that," said Griffiths.
The financial plan also outlined the city's 3 priority areas as well: safety and security, which detailed protective services spending on the RCMP contract, the Craft District, a planned rejuvination of downtown, and active transportation, with a small portion of the budget going to trail relocation and expansion.
