Actual expenses, 2025
$76.0 millionWhat North Cowichan spent
This is total actual expense in the audited financial statements, not the budget and not the SOFI cash-payment total.
- From 2024
- Up 9.4%
- From 2020
- Up 55.7%
The Numbers
Make public information understandable
Public information being available is not the same as it being easy to use. These are three basic numbers a resident should be able to find and understand without searching through hundreds of pages of reports.
The question behind the numbers
Is North Cowichan 9.4% better than it was last year?
Higher spending does not prove that services improved. A lower number would not prove that services got worse. We should be able to see what changed, what it cost, and whether residents got a better result.
Where the money comes from: Municipal expenses are not funded entirely by North Cowichan property tax. Revenue also comes from fees, utilities, grants, other governments, borrowing, reserves, and other sources. Provincial and federal contributions are still public money. Residents pay taxes to those governments too.
Explore the detailed spending data
I used AI-assisted tools to organize North Cowichan's public financial reports and make them easier to explore. The municipality should make this information this easy to use. AI can make mistakes, so this is a guide to the records, not a replacement for them. Every figure should be checked against the linked official source before it is relied upon.
Choose one or more services and a year range. The totals and year-over-year changes update automatically.
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| Year | Total | Change | Change % | Source |
|---|
Are we getting what we pay for?
Spending, population, inflation and the average homeowner
Compare total audited spending with population, British Columbia consumer prices, and North Cowichan municipal tax only.
What the tax figure includes: North Cowichan municipal property tax on the average assessed home reported for each year. It excludes taxes collected for the CVRD, Regional Hospital District, Province, BC Assessment and Municipal Finance Authority. It also excludes parcel taxes, utilities and the Home Owner Grant. It does not track one unchanged property because assessed values change.
Each line starts at 100 in the selected first year. A value of 125 means that measure is 25% higher than it was at the start.
| Year | Actual spending | Population |
|---|
Who was paid, and for what?
A name and an annual total are not enough
The SOFI combines actual expenses with cash payments that are not expenses. It includes tax forwarded to other governments, payroll deductions and debt principal. Those amounts need to be separated before judging North Cowichan spending.
See the whole picture
Where the money went
Cash disclosure, not an expense chart
Payments listed in the SOFI
These are cash payments grouped by payee. They are not all purchases or North Cowichan expenses.
The largest 2025 example
Cowichan Valley Regional District: $21,595,110
$16,264,843Confirmed CVRD property tax collected by North Cowichan and passed along. Not a North Cowichan expense.
$5,330,267The difference between the two published figures. The available reports do not itemize or reconcile it, so I cannot classify it as municipal spending, but I also cannot say it isn't.
I found the total cash payment in the 2025 SOFI and the tax-forwarding amount in the 2025 Annual Report. More detailed records may exist elsewhere, but I did not find a public schedule connecting the two. This should be easier to understand.
Kept separate from the ranked bars and expense charts: confirmed tax pass-throughs are not North Cowichan expenses. The full table still preserves the original SOFI cash disclosure. Mixed records and payments that cannot yet be classified should not be presented as confirmed municipal spending.
| Payee | Cash payment | Source |
|---|
Methodology and accounting changes
AI disclosure: AI-assisted software was used to extract, structure, and present figures from the municipality's published documents. The linked municipal reports remain the authoritative sources. Automated work can contain errors, so individual figures should be checked against the cited report before being relied upon.
Reported labels changed over time. Transportation is grouped with engineering and public works. Forestry and community or environmental development are combined for comparison; the 2025 statement reports their combined amount as “Other.” Financing and asset adjustments are kept separate.
The 2012 category lines differ from the statement’s published total by $30,000, and the 2015 lines differ by $1. Reconciliation records preserve the published totals and flag both differences.
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