Well, that didn’t take long.

Except for one big asterisk, it took city council only a few hours during budget talks this week to spend the entire $10-million London Hydro dividend they received from the local utility.

“I absolutely think we deployed it wisely and strategically,” Coun. Josh Morgan, the mayor’s budget czar, said of the handful of projects it will fund.

“(This) allows the money to go further and reduces the pressure on the tax rate.”

Morgan noted all the dividend-funded projects are one-time costs — and none of the cash will cover ongoing operating expenses, the third rail of budgeting.

City hall is the sole shareholder of London Hydro, and as such once in a while receives a large one-time dividend. Last year, the local utility forked over the eight-figure cash infusion.

But just like that — poof — it’s pretty much spoken for as city council continues through its multi-year budget deliberations.

The biggest single chunk, $5 million, is technically not yet spent. It’s parked in the city hall equivalent of a piggy bank with the words Back To The River scrawled on the side.

The project, the result of a competition led by the London Community Foundation, would see the forks of the Thames riverfront near downtown overhauled. The new look would include a boomerang-shaped bridge jutting out over the water.

City council this week debated spending more than $5 million from the Hydro dividend on the forks project. Instead, they committed only $700,000 of it to doing an environmental assessment study.

Another $5 million from the Hydro cash was put in the city’s economic development reserve fund. Council will decide whether to spend it on the river project once the environmental assessment is done.

The rest of the Hydro dividend was parcelled out on projects that indirectly help hold down taxes for the next four years, such as offsetting part of the urban forest strategy’s $3.8-million cost.

So what started as a $10-million windfall is now all but spent. Just $420,000 — equal to less than a 0.1 per cent tax cut — remains.

London’s multi-year budget, covering the years 2016-19, isn’t yet completed. Other big-ticket projects, including green-bin compost pickup, must still be debated.

As it stands now, the budget calls for an average annual tax hike for each of the next four years of 2.68 per cent, or $73, on a typical London home (“typical” being a home assessed at $221,000).

At least one more budget session needs to be held before council gives final approval on March 10.

patrick.maloney@sunmedia.ca

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$10 MILLION — POOF, GONE

The one-time London Hydro dividend that city hall received last year was vacuumed up into a series of projects during one evening of city council budget talks this week. Here’s where it went: