Saint Andrews Mayor Brad Henderson Wants Town to Control its own Budget

New Brunswick is currently preparing for province-wide amalgamation of local governments, which will culminate in municipal elections in November 2022. While some communities will have to elect entirely new councils for their newly defined municipalities, Saint Andrews is expanding more moderately to include the communities of Bayside and Chamcook into its borders to form the municipality of Saint Andrews. It will not change its name this fall and it will not require the current council to dissolve and re-run for their positions. Instead, the municipality will expand by adding new councillors to the mix to represent the newly added areas. 

"We are getting three new councillors: two from Chamcook and one from Bayside," said Mayor Brad Henderson. "We also hit a homerun in terms of fascilitators. We were assigned Don Fitzgerald, and he's been great in terms of making this process more seamless." 

Despite having a fascilator to help ease the process, Mayor Henderson says there are still many hiccups along the way before amalgamation crystalizes in November. 

"There are many concerns that I still have," said Henderson. "For instance, the residents of the Town of Saint Andrews voted for a mayor and councillors last year, and we normally pass the budget. That's how we were able to lower the mill rate for the first time last budget. Through municipal reform, they are saying that it is actually the province through appointed individuals who will pass our budget as a community, so that's extremely concerning when you have elected officials not able to be the ones to officially approve their own budget. People outside our community are the ones who will be approving our budget. Within our town, we should be able to pass our own budget because we have multi-year plans that quite frankly a person from outside the community do not know."