Waterloo Regional Police Service has tabled their 2013 budget, and in the words of the Chair of the Police Services Board, Tom Galloway, “It’s not a very pretty picture.”

The first draft of the budget asks for an addition $11.5 million. That works out to an 8.6% increase in spending year to year, or roughly 2.5% increase in the regional portion of property taxes.

“That’s just Police alone, that’s not including all the Regional Programs,” Galloway said, “when you combine the two [WRPS budget & other Waterloo Region services], it’s 4.9%.”

“That’s not what it’s going to be at the end of the day, council is not going to approve that kind of a budget.”

Galloway said the board has its work cut out for them to bring that figure down, due to the nature of Police Service costs, “it’s a very human resource intense service, and we’ll have to find some additional savings, but when 85% [of costs] are in salaries, you know where you have to look.”

Galloway calls this a very difficult budget year, with a number of factors all coming together, “Annualization costs, the new [consolidated] court building, $1.5 million in overtime, [Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System] pension increase, annualization of other officers, and debenture costs for the new Waterloo detachment.”

“A whole bunch of things coming together and it’s making it a very difficult budget year.”

The next Region of Waterloo budget related meeting is Wednesday, November 21st.

Mike.McCulloch@rci.rogers.com