SUNDRE - The town's first quarter financial report held no surprises, says the municipality's director of corporate services.
Chris Albert presented the report during a regularly scheduled meeting last month.
“I haven’t seen any surprises for Q1. We seem to be on track, especially in comparison to last year,” he said.
“But one of the things to note when comparing to last year, is Q1 2020 did not have COVID. So, we’re still dealing with some of the after effects of COVID.”
The impact, he said, was most notable at the Sundre Arena as well as the Sundre Community Centre, which due to widespread closures throughout the pandemic were not generating income.
“The lack of revenues there has been significant,” he said.
However, overall revenue is up a bit, he said.
“We did see a slight increase in tax penalty versus 2020.”
Additionally, he said solid waste costs have increased a bit.
“But we believe the new contract that we signed last year should be giving us some insight into why those costs are increasing and why they’re changing as much as they,” he said.
“We know one component of it, is because of utilizing a different composting facility. We know that ended up changing our structure a little bit.”
Concluding his presentation after covering a couple more highlights, Albert said the municipality remains in a “very good” cash position, with about $1.3 million in the operating account.
“We are down about $400,000 since the end of Q4 (2020). But that’s fairly normal for us. Most of our cash, because of taxation, comes in Q2.”
Council carried Albert’s financial report for information.
