This should have been Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s legacy budget, his closing statement on three terms in office and his aspiration for Montreal for the coming years, whether he’s leading the city or not.

Instead, Tremblay’s last municipal budget before the November 2013 city election became the butt of puns and cynical statements about corruption as soon as he and his right-hand man, city executive committee chairman Michael Applebaum, presented it at a news conference on Tuesday.

The $4.9-billion 2013 municipal budget is up by 2.7 per cent over this year, and calls for a 3.3 per cent average municipal tax increase for residential and non-residential ratepayers in the city.

Would the city like its tax increases stuffed in brown envelopes, one social media pundit asked sarcastically on Twitter while the news conference was still going on in the city’s finance building next door to city hall.

“It’s like Montrealers are paying a mortgage on corruption and it’s scandalous,” opposition Vision Montreal councillor Véronique Fournier later told reporters in reaction to the tax hikes and long-term debt-financing costs contained in the spending plan.

“I think today Montrealers should find the 3.3 per cent increase in taxes indecent because in the past there were no control measures to prevent the situation we find ourselves in.”

If it wasn’t already obvious, it became clear with Tremblay’s budget presentation that at the end of three terms, the legacy of the longest-serving mayor of Montreal since Jean Drapeau will be this: corruption.

Not the conservative banking decisions that brought the city interest savings on more than $1 billion of debt in Tremblay’s first term. Not the long-awaited repair of neglected rotting infrastructure, albeit this carry-over promise from the first term remains far from complete. Not the new bus routes, extended métro hours and added bike paths. And not the vague promise of a tramway someday, maybe, we’ll see.

Tremblay’s legacy will be the very thing that city hall observers have long speculated prompted him to run for a third term in the first place. Since 2009, when corruption allegations began to surface late in his second mandate, Tremblay has sought to cleanse his administration’s image and reinvent himself as a crime fighter.

Yet as Tremblay was reading his budget speech at his news conference on Tuesday, one of his ruling Union Montreal’s former aides was describing in graphic detail to the Charbonneau Commission examining corruption in Quebec’s construction industry how Tremblay had instructed his party’s backroom organizers in his first mandate not to allow a trail of huge illegal campaign contributions to ever lead to him by telling them he “did not need to know about this.”

Tremblay categorically denied the allegations.

The testimony of the former organizer, Martin Dumont, has crushed Tremblay’s credibility, even his ability to table a balanced city budget devoid of frou-frou projects and with only a modest spending increase just above the rate of inflation.