Jeff Yeager: Ward 15 City Council candidate

The City of Hamilton could be facing a fiscal crisis.

I say could because the City has not released any audited financial statements since year-end 2022.

The current term of City Council has not restored the City's basic financial information systems and controls following the February 2024 cybersecurity failure.

As a result, Hamilton is the only Ontario city to have its credit rating downgraded this past council term and could experience another downgrade.

What steps will you take to address the city's deficiencies in financial systems and controls?

For me, I'm looking at it that we need to restore confidence to begin with, not only in the residents, but Standard & Poor's who done the audit and did the downgrade from AAA down to AA+.

It's still a good rating.

And I wouldn't say that we're in a financial crisis, but I do think we have a serious financial governance and reporting problem.

We still have strong liquidity, relatively low debt.

What I'd like to see is for every outstanding issue that's going on with this, because it's been pretty quiet all along.

There really isn't a lot of information out there in terms of where we're at.

So for every issue, I want to see what remains, what has to be done, who owns that, what's the deadline of it, and what's the current status that it sits at.

Financial controls, are they restored? Is the audit completed? And reporting all of that publicly, it's very similar to a communication overall.

When you go on a trip and you go to the airport, you see here's all the flights, whether they're on time, whether delayed, whether they're canceled.

They don't cancel a flight and not tell you.

They don't delay a flight and not give you that information.

And that's the kind of information that we deserve as residents and taxpayers.

Even if the city is not in a fiscal crisis, it is a fact that the 2027 budget will require difficult decisions because much of the city's current spending is financed using depleting reserve funds and creative accounting methods such as borrowing from restricted reserves.

What will be your approach to budgeting during the coming four years?

You can't use temporary money to fund ongoing expenses permanently.

You have to prioritize the core services.

So what are the required essential services? We need to look at those first.

What are the outcome, the results that we're looking to have? The duplication of services that we can consolidate and save money from there.

Discretionary spending that we're doing, is it performing the way we expect? If not, then we need to review that and make some tough decisions there.

Are there alternatives to how we spend money and what needs to be done? Everything doesn't have to come from taxes.