Barrie council passes 2026 budget with 3.95 per cent tax hike

Barrie City Council approves the 2026 budget with a 4.8 per cent tax increase.

Barrie residents will see their taxes rise next year after city council approved the 2026 budget on Wednesday night.

The City says the overall tax rate will go up by about 3.95 per cent, with the biggest portion tied to infrastructure.

According to staff, that increase will help pay for ongoing repairs to streets, utilities and other core services. A similar amount is earmarked for the Barrie Police Service, while the third-largest contributor is the share the City pays to the County of Simcoe.

Mayor Alex Nuttall said Wednesday he believes the city is not getting full value from the money it sends to the County each year. Following the meeting, he pointed to long-term care as one of the clearest examples of that imbalance.

County-operated long-term care homes offer roughly 500 beds in total. According to the mayor, only about 30 of those beds are used by people from Barrie, even though the City accounts for nearly half of the County’s population.

“It’s not right,” Nuttall said. “The people of Barrie, we take care of ourselves… we want to be a city that’s caring and compassionate, that takes care of our people. We can’t take care of our people even though we’re spending the money to do so because those dollars are being taken out of Barrie and spent somewhere else, and then providing beds to those who aren’t from Barrie… so we just need to have a fair shake on this.”

Before council passed the budget, members also directed staff to renegotiate the City’s service agreement with the County. Their goal, according to council, is to secure a commitment for the first County-operated long-term care home to be built within Barrie.

Council has given staff until June to reach that agreement. If no firm commitment is in place by then, councillors say the City will explore building its own public long-term care home specifically for residents living in Barrie.