By KEVIN BERGER, Local Journalism Initiative
RM of Corman Park councillors voted during their May 26 meeting to approve a revised 2026 operating budget that incorporates a number of changes that have occurred since the budget was originally approved in December.
Originally, council had reviewed a preliminary budget on November 12, 2025, and directed administration to utilize reserves to offset any shortfalls.
The final budget was then adopted about a month later. At the time, the RM projected that they would generate $27.609 million in revenue and $25.28 million in expenses, resulting in a surplus of $2.328 million.
However, since the budget’s adoption, additional information has been received impacting several key areas of the operating budget including hamlet expenditures, fire service fee revenue and capital project spending, said Director of Finance and Information Technology (IT) Cal Hamm.
“Overall, the revised 2026 budget has a positive variance of $174,000, as compared to the budget approved at the December 16, 2025 council meeting,” Hamm said.
The first change resulting in this positive variance was an increase in the provincial Municipal Revenue Sharing grant announced in March. The original 2026 budget projected that the RM would receive $1.8 million, but the grant has increased to $2 million, making for a positive variance of $200,000.
The next change concerned municipal potash tax-sharing, which was noted to be a long-standing provincial program established in 1968 under The Municipal Tax Sharing (Potash) Act in recognition of the fact that potash mines have impacts on municipalities other than the ones where they are located.
The RM had already expected its share of potash tax sharing to be $1.64 million for 2026, but that amount has since been confirmed to be $1.68 million, a positive variance of $36,632.
Earlier in the meeting, during a separate discussion of the potash mill rate, Reeve Joe Hargrave noted that Corman Park was very fortunate to see its potash revenue increase, as some other municipalities were seeing their revenue drop “substantially.”
Another major change has been the result of the Fire Service Fee Policy’s introduction, which has resulted in fire service fee revenue being upped from $450,000 annually to $600,000.
On the other side of the column, there has been an increase in hamlet expenditures from $349,600 to $773,629.
Hamm noted that when the 2026 budget was approved in December, they were lacking a number of hamlet budgets, which have since come in.
“The (hamlet) expenditures have increased significantly from what was originally budgeted,” he said.
However, Hamm also pointed out that hamlet budgets are fully offset through reserve transfers, so there is no direct impact on the RM of Corman Park’s bottom line.
As well, there have been some revisions to capital projects, most notably the Grasswood Road capital project increasing by $225,524 due to the current conflict in the Middle East driving up construction costs.
The Township Road 394 tender has also come in under budget by $158,651, so the net impact of these two capital project expenditures is a negative variance of $66,874.