It wasn't magic. It was a strategy, a misdirection, called internal debt.
Think of internal debt like borrowing from your own RRSP to buy your first home or pay for school. It is entirely legal to tap into those savings, but you are always supposed to pay yourself back.
Municipially, Langford regularly borrowed from its own reserve funds to pay for massive infrastructure projects. But unlike a traditional bank loan, there was no mandatory timeline or concrete plan to pay that money back. Because of that, the city still has outstanding internal debts for infrastructure projects that date all the way back to the early 2000s.
To make matters more complicated, new infrastructure always leaves behind a trail of long-term costs. It isn't just the daily operations you have to fund, but the eventual cost to repair and replace things as they age. When you do not plan for those trailing costs, you end up with unstaffed fire halls, or you are forced to sell off public assets entirely like the North Langford Recreation Centre back in 2020.
Debt can be a highly powerful tool for a growing city, but it has to be managed responsibly. A non-trivial chunk of this term's tax adjustment went directly toward paying off these old internal bills, some of which are now over two decades old.
We cannot keep pushing today's bills onto tomorrow's taxpayers. This is exactly why I brought forward a notice of motion to create a formal Internal Borrowing Bylaw. This ensures that the city can no longer borrow from its own reserves without a mandatory, completely transparent plan to pay it back.
True fiscal management means clearing the hidden debts of the past while building a stable foundation for the future. Watch the video below to see exactly how we are modernizing Langford's financial policies while breaking down where your tax dollars went this term.