City's budget reflects Calgarian priorities

I write a monthly column in the Calgary Herald. Here is my December article:

OK, I will admit that I might have complained a bit over the past week about the sheer volume of city council’s budget and business plan approval meetings. Seven days of debate can take a lot out of a person.

But as long as those meetings were, they were also remarkable. Can you imagine another level of government having open hearings where all department directors appear, live on TV and the web, to talk about their plans for serving citizens and the associated costs?

This was, of course, only the culmination of a year-long process of engagement with Calgarians on what they expect from their city and how we should pay for it. More than 24,000 Calgarians participated in the process, giving us the gift of their thoughts and ideas.

While some of the coverage of the budget debate focused on the horse race who-wins-who-loses stuff of partisan politics, and there were even stories about my psychological state of mind — I checked with my mother, and she confirmed that I should ensure a nice breakfast before meetings if I will be dealing with cranky people — Calgarians were more interested in the decisions we made.

(And, for the record: yes, all members of council still get along; yes, we still eat lunch together; and yes, the tone is very different from the previous council. People are listening to one another and collaborating on solutions across all artificial political divides.)

Council worked to pull together a plan that reflected what we heard from Calgarians: a desire to hold the line on taxes while preserving and investing in the services that people value.

It’s certainly true that I was not pleased with every decision that council made. In particular, I felt that the Calgary Police Service, as our largest single budget, should also find some efficiency in the order of about 1.5 per cent on a $300-million budget. I was pleased that the police service brought forth a plan to become more efficient without touching front-line service, but a majority of my council colleagues disagreed.

I also felt that we should have given Premier Alison Redford some time to fulfil her election promise of better police funding before we decided to pay for the hiring of new police officers out of the property tax base.

Taken together, these changes to the police budget added up to about $1 per month for the average household, or three-tenths of a per cent of the total city budget.

The rest of the budget, I think, strikes the right balance. City spending is increasing by about 2.7 per cent (well below the rate of inflation, plus growth), meaning that we had to find a number of efficiencies — over $100 million worth — without impacting city services.

We’ve also given the green light to a new zero-based budgeting review process that will start early in the new year that should result in even more efficiencies over time.

Our residential property taxes remain among the very lowest in Canada. And, while this was not the time for major increases in spending, we are investing in improvements to transit (we are, of course, opening the first new LRT line in a generation in 2013), snow removal (where the higher level of service we experimented with last year will be maintained, and we’ll stop using the road maintenance budget to supplement the snow budget in heavy snow years) and parks (where we’ll see a long-awaited refresh of Bowness Park and a major investment in off-leash dog parks).

The big thing about this budget process, though, has been how it highlighted some of the structural concerns we face. To begin with, only eight cents of every tax dollar you pay goes to the city. The other 92 cents go to the provincial and the federal governments. Furthermore, the city’s tax take is almost entirely in the form of the unfair, regressive property tax, which does not take into account ability to pay.

And, as we saw with the federal government’s sudden refusal to partially fund recreation centres in Calgary, our financial fate too often lies somewhere else. While it is the federal government’s prerogative to spend our federal tax money (notwithstanding that Calgary taxpayers send $10 billion more to Ottawa each year than we receive in all federal benefits), to do so in such a capricious way, without any explanation to Calgary citizens, is unfair.

The solution here is not just to reverse the rec centre decision (and, if it was really an error of two federal bodies miscommunicating, as one member of parliament has implied, why are the citizens of Calgary on the hook for $3.1 million?), but to fundamentally change how cities are funded. But that’s something we’ll speak more about in 2012.

Overall, 2011 was a fantastic year for Calgary. And, you know what? 2012 will be even better.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone, and we’ll see you back on this page in January!

- Mayor Naheed Nenshi