Calgary's new central library result of new Community Investment Fund

Earlier this week, Mayor Nenshi and City Council took a major step toward creating a much-needed and long-overdue new central public library in Calgary--they approved a site and committed $175 million to the new library. The new location will be in the edge of the East Village just east of the Calgary Municipal Building and close by the new City Hall CTrain station.

Much more than just a place to hold books, the new central library will also be a site that caters to the arts, literacy, education, and cultural needs of our growing 1.1 million person community. (Did you know that the old central library was built for a community just one-third Calgary's current size and well before the Internet?!) Modern libraries are also vital public spaces that host an array of programs and services where technology, space, art, performance, discovery, and dialogue converge.

And what's more, the vision for the new central library is to make it a cornerstone of a new cultural campus with significant exhibit and performing arts spaces. And while City Council has made a significant investment into the library itself, this vision requires the private sector and other levels of government to step up as well.

The Calgary Public Library expects to be breaking ground on this new facility as early as next year. It's a fitting timeline since 2012 will also be the 100th anniversary of this important community institution.

Community Investment Fund

The new central library is made possible for a major new fund created by City Council to invest in sorely-needed community facilities. Parks, recreation centres, fire halls, community halls and sports fields are such important parts of our communities yet they receive no sustainable funding whether it be for new projects or maintenance.

As part of Mayor Nenshi's commitment to transform government and focus on vibrant and healthy urban communities, City Council created the new Community Investment Fund. Over the next six years, the City will use the fund to invest $252 million into tangible and useful community improvements. Here's the Council-approved list of projects:

• New Central Library - $135 Million *
• Four New P3 Recreation Centres (three in SE and one in NW) - $25 Million *
• Capital Civic Partners Grant Project** - $17.1 Million
• Aquatic Facilities - $12.45 Million
• upgrades to Shouldice, Glenmore and Acadia Pools
• redesign consultation for Beltline and Inglewood Pools
• Community Associations and Recreation Groups (lifecycle) - $12 Million
• Arenas - $9.9 Million
• upgrades to Ernie Starr, Henry Viney and Frank McCool
• Bowness Park (restoration and redevelopment) - $9.45 Million
• Laycock Park (restoration of natural wetlands) - $6.95 Million
• Playground Lifecycle and Wading Pool Retrofits (city-wide) - $5.45 Million
• Parks Lifecycle (city-wide) - $4.7 Million
• Athletic Fields Irrigation (city-wide) - $3.8 Million
• Sport Fields Lifecycle and Renovations (city-wide) - $3.6 Million
• Lifecycle Personal Protective Equipment for Firefighters (city-wide) - $3.6 Million
• Fire Station #1 Rehabilitation - $3 Million

TOTAL - $252 Million

* In addition to grants already made
** This is a new grant project that will be available to City of Calgary Civic Partners to assist with ongoing lifecycle maintenance needs to their existing facility.

The Community Investment Fund is designed to be a sustainable and regular source of funding for investments into the facilities that make living in Calgary so great. This is a big change from previous funding that was inconsistent and based on grants from other levels of government which left Calgary with billions of unfunded community projects whether it be new rec centres or repairing leaky roofs. Every year, Council will review the list of funded projects to see what can be added or adjusted.

Whether it's playgrounds or pools, we use these important facilities in our communities every day. Council's commitment to the Community Investment Fund is an important part of making Calgary even better.

- Daorcey from Mayor Nenshi's team

When it comes to poverty, the buck stops here

Continuing poverty is one of the great failings of our society. Calgary, like any other community, is not immune to the effects of poverty.  Poverty lessens our great city every day.

That's why I'm so pleased that on July 25th City Council passed my motion to develop a Poverty Reduction Initiative. In partnership with the United Way, we will strike a group of community leaders responsible for discovering one very important thing:

What is the game-changing idea that will dramatically reduce poverty in Calgary?

We've learned so much from the successful model of the 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness which has resulted in 160 organizations working together on the single objective of ending homelessness. And yes, three years in, homelessness in Calgary is dropping.

We can do that with poverty. We know that we will be able to coordinate and inspire the actions of existing agencies, businesses, governments, faith and community groups to come together to work towards the elimination of poverty in Calgary. And together, we can fight it at a systemic level eschewing band-aid solutions.

Some people might ask why. True, poverty is technical responsibility of the province and not the municipality.

But who suffers from poverty? We do. Our neighbours do. The citizens of Calgary do.

And so poverty is very much our responsibility. We must fight it, and I will not accept the endless buck-passing that has brought us to the point.

The buck must stop here. It must stop with all of us.

I welcome you to share your own big idea on how we can reduce poverty in Calgary by either adding your thoughts below or joining a discussion already in progress at the United Way's Calgary Social Voice blog.

- Mayor Naheed Nenshi

Better data makes for better decisions - Calgary's 2011 civic census results

Highlighting that good data makes for good decisions at City Hall, Mayor Nenshi announced the results of the 2011 Calgary civic census today. While the big number is 1,090,936 (our population grew over the past year through migration and additional births), Mayor Nenshi also discussed how individual communities have grown over the past year. the population growth and decline of specific communities is a very important factor for planning for our city. The image above is of the community map showing that growth and decline by community.

The census also includes information about our demographics across the city including results related to transportation use, employment and housing. You can download the new report and even the raw data (in Excel files) from the City of Calgary's census website and read today's news release below.

- Daorcey from Mayor Nenshi's team

City Releases 2011 Census Results

Calgary – The 2011 Civic Census results for the period from April 2010 to April 2011 show that Calgary’s population has reached 1,090,936. This is an increase of 19,421 residents from April 2010 when the Civic Census showed the City’s population was 1,071,515. This represents an increase of 1.81%. This volume of population growth is similar to what was experienced in 2001 and 2003.

“Good, accurate data like that included in the Calgary Civic Census is the basis for smart decision-making about the future of our community,” said Mayor Naheed Nenshi. “City management, my City Council colleagues, and I will use the information in this report to help guide us toward creating the better Calgary we all seek.”

Specific results from the 2011 Civic Census

Community Growth
Panorama Hills continued to lead the way in growth with a population increase of 1,952 residents. Four other communities also had an increase of more than 1,000 residents. The communities with a population increase of more than 1,000 are:

• Panorama Hills (1,952 residents)
• Auburn Bay (1,552 residents)
• New Brighton (1,236 residents)
• Cranston (1,186 residents)
• Skyview Ranch (1,093 residents)

Four communities grew by 100% or more. The communities are:

• Mahogany (205% or 530 residents)
• Walden (183% or 384 residents)
• Skyview Ranch (154% or 1093 residents)
• Sage Hill (102% or 718 residents)

“After a pattern of population decline in many established neighbourhoods over many years, it’s a good sign that many of these communities have experienced recent population growth,” said Mayor Nenshi. “If we can maintain this trend through smart policies and investments, the result will be more sustainable, vibrant, and healthy communities that Calgarians want.”

Net Migration and Natural Increase
Net migration is the difference between the number of persons moving into Calgary and the number moving away. Over the past 12 months, 9,563 more people moved to Calgary than moved away from Calgary. This is a significant increase over 2010 when Calgary experienced a negative net migration with 4,154 more people moving away from Calgary than to Calgary.

Housing
The number of housing units, both existing and under construction, increased to 450,952 up from 445,455. This is an increase of 5,497 from April 2010.

The number of vacant dwelling units in Calgary decreased from 16,929 in 2010 to 16,180 in 2011. The overall vacancy rate in the city is 3.69%, down from 3.93% in April 2010.

There are now 422,290 occupied dwellings. Of this number, 296,020 or 70.1% are owner-occupied. In 2010, the comparable percentage was 70.65%.

Age and Gender
As per Census Policy, age and gender data was collected in 2011. The total number of males (547,782) slightly exceeds the number of females (543,154). In the breakdown of age groups, the largest age groups are 25-34 (16.79%) and 35-44 (16.68%).

Number of Employed
As per Census Policy, the number of employed was collected in 2011. The total number of respondents 15 years of age and older who indicated they worked either part-time or full-time, including those who are self employed is 585,169. This represents 65.29% of the population 15 years of age and older.

Mode of Transportation
2011 was the inaugural year for the mode of transportation question. One working respondent in each household was asked how they travelled to work. Of respondents, 69.58% indicated they drove to work alone and 17.15% take public transit.

The Civic Census Results Book and additional tables will be available online at www.calgary.ca/census, by mid-afternoon on July 27, 2011.

-30-

Falling in love with Calgary a little bit more

Adding a bit of purple to a Glenbow Museum
street art project

I write a monthly column in the Calgary Sun. Here is the full July story which appeared only in print which can now be read online at the Calgary Sun.

This has certainly been some week. It started with some out-of-town visitors, a very nice newlywed couple from Britain, and moved smoothly into Stampede craziness. While this is far from my first rodeo, it is in fact my first rodeo as your mayor (or, as one wag put it, "Cowboy-in-Chief") and it's been great to once again experience Calgary at its best.

(As for my favourite Stampede experiences, representing Calgarians to Their Royal Highnesses was a great honour, as was riding a horse in the parade. Even better were the Duke--and especially the Duchess--saying I looked good on my horse. However, the less said about the Doughnut Burger Incident, the better.)

But in the midst of the smiles and good times, there are some deeper lessons we can take from how we present our city to ourselves and to visitors this week.

A walk down Stephen Avenue on a sunny afternoon shows people enjoying their city--out in public, on patios, sitting on benches, listening to music. It is, in fact, the very picture of urban vibrancy. Of course, it's made all the better this week by the organizations, businesses, and thousands of volunteers helping us to enjoy the Calgary Stampede. How could anyone visiting this city not fall in love with it just a little bit? Or, in the case of we long-term Calgarians, fall in love a little bit more?

But let's break this down. What makes this scene work? We can't control the weather (City Council keeps turning down my proposal for a giant WeatherDome (tm)), but we can help influence some of the other factors.

First, the streets are safe, thanks to visible police patrols and a "broken windows" philosophy from government, the Calgary Downtown Association, and individual business owners and citizens who keep the place tidy, and clean up litter and unwanted graffiti.

There is far less visible homelessness than there once was, in part due to great strides made in the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness.

The public spaces are attractive. There are great flowers in the warmer months, and really terrific lighting in the winter. There is plenty of comfortable seating.

Music is everywhere from formal stages to a multitude of buskers. A program to reduce regulations and make it much easier for buskers to play and earn a living has meant a great increase in their numbers (and their talent!).

And then there are the patios themselves. There are 180 licensed patios in the Centre City, ranging from WEST's patio (600 person capacity, 15,000 sq ft) to a few chairs outside of a coffee shop. We've actively encouraged the creation of patios and continue to remove red tape to help businesses succeed and grow.

What's interesting about this is that it's really driven by private business, acting individually and collectively through their Business Revitalization Zone. But that government, acting for the citizens of Calgary, also has a role to play. We need to set expectations, create the infrastructure for business to succeed, and then get out of the way.

This really matters. Calgary is competing on a global stage now, and we need to ensure that the best people around the world want to move here, invest here, start businesses here, and raise families here.

Certainly, we have to be efficient. We have to get snow off the roads, and pick up the garbage, and supply clean water, and have police and fire and 911 looking after us, and we have to do it all at a fair price in taxes and fees.

But these are just tickets to the game. We also have to have a winning team on the field, and this means having an attractive city where people want to live. That means building on what really works and having even greater urban vibrancy.

I've got some visitors from out of town this weekend. They've never been to Calgary before. I'm taking them out to a patio for dinner, showing them the Stampede, sending them to do a long run on the East Calgary Greenway, and taking a raft trip down the river.

Want to bet they won't want to leave?

- Mayor Naheed Nenshi

Happy Stampede!

Yahoo!

It's the end of the first day of Stampede and it's been a busy one for Mayor Nenshi. From riding a horse (named Garfield) in the parade to opening the Indian Village, he's right into the Calgary Stampede spirit.

Mayor Nenshi (dark jacket on the right), elders and other VIPs at Indian Village opening

Oh, and he had to see a few friends off to the airport. Mayor Nenshi joined a few thousand proud Calgarians as we bid our official farewell to Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Mayor Nenshi and the Stampede royalty
(left to right Ava Meguinis, Stpehanie Gray, Mayor Nenshi, Jenna Lambert, Whitney Wilkie)

The next nine days promise to a heck of a great party. We hope you get an opportunity to kick up your heels and enjoy the festivities happening all around Calgary.

Today might have been a busy day, but Mayor Nenshi has a schedule planned that might just wear out one of his pairs of boots. If you see us Stampeding, please say hi!

Preparing to start the parade... atop a horse. He really shouldn't tweet and ride.

- Daorcey from Mayor Nenshi's team (who takes photos with his smartphone... apologies)

Media Statement: South West Ring Road

I am pleased that the Tsuu T'ina have decided to recommence discussions about constructing the south west portion of the ring road through the Tsuu T'ina Nation. This is the best option for the ring road and will be a win / win solution for both the citizens of the Nation and the citizens of Calgary. The City will be happy to be a willing partner in these negotiations.

- Mayor Naheed Nenshi

City aggressively looking for efficiencies

I write a monthly column in the Calgary Herald. Here's the full text of my July 1st story:

Happy Canada Day! I'll be spending the day in every part of the city (wonder if I can get from Evergreen to Westwinds in 37 minutes?) celebrating our great nation. In particular, I'll be celebrating the volunteers who have organized events in parks and churchyards for their neighbours to enjoy.

And really, that's what it's all about -building a stronger community in whatever way each of us can.

Your city council held this discussion in great detail over the past few months. While the numbers on the indicative tax rates got all the attention (and we'll get back to those in a moment), the backdrop was the creation of a new plan for Calgary for the next three years. The key elements of this plan are:

• Ensuring every Calgarian lives in a safe community and has the opportunity to succeed;
• Investing in great communities and a vibrant urban fabric;
• Moving people and goods throughout the city efficiently and sustainably;
• Making Calgary the best place in Canada for a business to start and flourish.

In order to do this at a reasonable cost to citizens, we need to work in two further areas:

• Becoming a more effective and disciplined organization;
• Changing the rules of the game to ensure better financial capacity (this means continuing to press the provincial and federal governments for tax reform).

Within each of these areas, we have activities that we will focus on. For example, in "moving people and goods," we discuss a new long-term capital and network plan for transportation that focuses our roads spending on choke points in the existing network, improving the customer-service focus of Calgary Transit, investing in commuter cycling infrastructure, and refocusing pedestrian infrastructure spending in places where people actually already walk or will likely walk.

The challenging aspect of this is how we continue to provide the services people need at a cost we can all afford. We just completed a large public discussion process in which Calgarians told us we have to spend every dollar well, but that they also truly value the services the city provides.

(This dichotomy was nicely evidenced on these very pages on Tuesday - the editorial board argued for the city to use deliberative engagement to solve the secondary suite issue, and directly next to their editorial, Licia Corbella, who chairs the editorial board, took the city to task for spending money on . . . deliberative engagement.)

So, where does that leave us?

After what I would characterize as an insightful, values-driven (though very long) debate, council set aside ideology and concluded that Calgarians would be best served by keeping property taxes at inflation plus population growth, or about five per cent per year for the next three years. (For comparison's sake, the average weekly earnings in Alberta increased about 4.7 per cent last year).

This doesn't mean, however, that we will just keep doing the same stuff we've always been doing. Because we only control about half of our revenues hrough the property tax, constraining our taxes to grow at inflation means that our expenses need to grow at half the rate of inflation.

In real terms, that means that council has now directed cuts of about $140 million over the next three years. I am confident that we can do this - there are more efficiencies to be found within the city budget.

If the cuts are too deep, or remove services that council members think are important, council could conceivably reverse them in November. But we have to take leadership in searching for efficiencies throughout the organization.

We won't be able to do this forever; the city cannot hide from inflation. Imagine how increases in the price of gas have impacted your personal budget in the last few years. Now think about how many tanks of gas the city has to fill every day -fire trucks, buses, garbage trucks, police cars. These are costs we can't control.

But I think that there are step-changes in efficiency possible, and I am looking forward to results from our new zero-based budget review process in this threeyear cycle.

The other big issue is debt. I hate debt, and I particularly hate interest payments, since I think of them as wasted money. Of course, sometimes we need to incur debt to build things that we don't have the cash on hand for -it's like taking out a mortgage. But such debt must be accompanied by solid plans to pay it down.

Unfortunately, we have incurred an enormous debt in providing safe drinking water to Calgarians, and bad decisions by past councils meant we have been digging the hole deeper and deeper.

And that is unacceptable. We can't charge less than it costs to provide clean water and expect our children and grandchildren to pay the rest, plus interest.

That's why we had to bite the bullet and increase water rates by about $8 per month next year. It was, I believe, the right thing to do.

In the end, taxes will increase at the rate of inflation, utility rates will help us reduce our debt, and the total amount taken by the city will remain amongst the lowest in Canada.

And we'll provide the services that we all need to have an even better community.

- Mayor Naheed Nenshi

Mayor Nenshi Reads: The Cremation of Sam McGee

Happy Canada Day!

It's time for an admission: ever since kids across the city went wild for Mayor Nenshi's rendition of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, His Worship has wanted to do a regular Storytime with the Mayor. I have been resisting. A lot.

But, back when there was still snow on the ground, Mayor Nenshi recorded a video for a Literacy Day event at a local school, reading a classic poem by Robert Service. It's been sitting on my camera for too long, and we thought Canada Day would be a good time to release it to everyone.

(He spends some time with schoolchildren every week at City Hall School, by the way, and sometimes, when he's in the mood, he reads to them. I must say this is not the best he's ever done, but it's pretty good.)

So, here's a little Canada Day gift for the children of Calgary.

And, once again, from all of us at the Mayor's Office: Happy Canada Day!

- Daorcey from Mayor Nenshi's team