Windsor's mayor is relieved after hearing what Premier Doug Ford had to say at an announcement on Monday morning.
The premier says the cuts his government was set to impose after municipalities had already set their budgets will be rolled back.
Mayor Drew Dilkens told AM800 listeners on the Lynn Martin Show that it shows the Conservative government is listening.
"The large urban mayors met with the Minister of Municipal Affairs on Friday and conveyed that message that you just can't go retroactive with cuts. If you're going to do things moving forward let's have a conversation but do not make it retroactive. So we're pleased that the premier listened and has decided to make that change," he says.
Dilkens says it's only fair to give municipalities the time to plan for funding reductions and adds there still aren’t a lot of details on what the announcement means.
"Looking forward that gives us the better part of half a year to have discussions with province on how they might look at rolling out future cuts because clearly the situation as it exists today in the province of Ontario cannot continue," he says. "I don't know whether they continue to implement the changes and scale down the number of health units from 35 to 10? We're not quite sure, but I would anticipate just based on the wording that I'm reading that is still the case, but that they're not going to come back and try and seek and have cities pay for costs after we've already approved our budget and didn't factor that in."
Previous to the announcement of the cuts being rolled back, the provincial government has offered to pay for outside, line-by-line review of city and school board budgets as it continues to deal with an $11.7-billion deficit.
Dilkens points out that Windsor has an eight-year record of zero budget increases and only a 1.85% increase this year.
He says it will be very difficult to find much additional savings.
"We did basically line-by-line reviews for eight years, so to find a four per cent savings in the budget would equate to about a $16-million decrease for the City of Windsor. I can assure you that whether there were $7-million or $17-million available it would be very difficult to do that without cutting services."
Dilkens says even though it may not help much to reduce Windsor's spending, the city will still apply for a share of the provincial funding.