The Rainy River District Social Services Administration Board has its budget in place.

Spending will total $31.2 million. Chief Administrative Officer Dan McCormick says that is $3.5 million more than last year.

“It’s a lot more provincial dollars flowing into our programs, particularly on child care, where the $10 average cost per day for childcare rolled out by the province and the federal government is slowly working towards,” says McCormick.

Spending on children’s services increases by $1.1 million.

There are also increases in emergency medical services, community housing and administration.

Land Ambulance costs are up $1.1 million due to higher staffing costs and increases in fuel costs and insurance.

Community Housing expenditures are up $863 thousand because of interdepartmental accounting practices for charges across programs for maintenance services.

Ontario Works is down $362 thousand due to program changes with the provincial move to centralized intake and a decrease in client expenses.

Administration costs are up about $500,000.

“We do have increases for annual staff, about 1.75 (per cent), which has been negotiated on several long-term contracts.”
Two contracts are four years in length, with another being five years long.

The municipal share increases.

Area municipalities combined contribute $483 thousand, a 9.96% increase over 2022.

Much of that money goes to housing where municipalities must pay 100 per cent of expenses.

“The province sort of stopped paying a lot of incremental costs in 2002. So the municipalities have been bearing out for many years. Costs of gas, hydro, all your utilities are now totally pretty much borne by the municipalities. There have been significant increases on those line items. The other thing is we’ve seen where we’re doing renovations or upgrades to buildings. Our costs are 30% to 40% higher simply due to supply chain issues.”

To ease the burden, the Board is returning $250,000 in surplus money from the prior year surplus to municipalities.
The capital budget sees $1.7 million in spending on such things as two new ambulances, paving of housing parking lots and additional camera and card access systems.