Châteauguay ends 2019 with a $3M surplus

The City of Châteauguay has finished off 2019 with $3M surplus on a budget of $94M. Transfer taxes which were $2M above estimations contributed to that surplus. They are collected from real estate transactions and amounted to $4.7M, compared with the city projection of $2.7M. “The city is booming. There has been a significant number of home sales and purchases,” underscored Mayor Pierre-Paul Routhier Friday morning as he presented the city’s 2019 financial statements to members of the media. Loans of service to other municipalities also yielded $1M more than expected. Additionally, Châteauguay received compensation for the firefighters it sent to municipalities dealing with flooding. The fact that citizens placed less garbage in the bin for landfill weighed in the balance and the city’s reimbursement payment was larger than anticipated as well. At $85.4M, the city was close to its planned expenditures, as $85.2M had been budgeted. “We managed to control our expenses and I am very proud of that,” Mr. Routhier stated. Among the city’s achievements the mayor also included long-term debt reduction, from $131.6M in 2015, to $124M in 2019. “The debt is something that I really care about. We lowered it drastically,” he emphasized. In 2019, the municipality spent $11.2M on long-term debt repayment, $1M more than it had originally earmarked. As of December 31, 2019, the city’s accumulated surplus amounted to $31.2M. “It is an interesting show of financial health,” stated Pierre-Paul Routhier. Delays Caused by Hacking The submission of the 2019 financial statements was a few months behind schedule. The mayor attributed the delay to the computer hack on the city this year. The municipality’s data was encrypted. Hackers demanded a ransom to make the data accessible again. “The ransom they demanded was over $1M,” the mayor revealed on Friday. “There was no way that we were going to get into that. Even if we had paid, we had no guarantee that we would have been able to recover the data,” he explained. Following the attack, the city spent between $700,000 and $750,000 recovering the data and improving its computer equipment. “That includes enhancing protection capabilities for our devices and upgrading them. We were still using Windows 7. We updated everything,” Mayor Routhier assured. Translation Amanda Bennett