Calgary dips to D+ on fiscal report card
Documents least clear, study says
The City of Calgary tied with the Durham region in Ontario for the country’s least clear financial documents in an annual study by a Toronto-based think-tank that grades the fiscal accountability of Canada’s 28 largest municipalities.
Calgary registered the largest year-over-year decline in budget clarity — dropping from a grade of A- in 2016 to D+ in 2017 — in the latest edition of a C.D. Howe Institute study that grades the financial reports of Canadian cities.
The “Fuzzy Finances” report argues “annual budgets in Canada’s major municipalities are a mess” and that most Canadian municipalities “obscure financial reports,” making it nearly impossible for citizens to hold their municipal governments to account.
The rankings come as Calgary city council debates the 2018 budget adjustments this week.
“Simple questions like, ‘How much does your municipal government plan to spend this year?’ or ‘How does what it plans to spend this year compare to what it spent last year?’ are hard or impossible for a non-expert citizen or councillor to answer,” state the authors of the report.
While Calgary received a strong grade last year thanks to the strength of its four-year 2015-18 fiscal plan, the latest report card said the city’s 2017 budget documents contained significant modifications that made them less complete and provided little information in a reader-friendly format.
“Among other defects, the midcycle update buries key information, does not provide updated historical results and nets nonproperty tax revenues against spending. For these reasons, we award Calgary a D+ in our 2017 report card,” states the 24-page report, which adds that Calgary’s documents “mix their presentation of gross versus net figures.”
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he suspects Calgary’s grade will rise again when the annual report card grades the city’s next comprehensive four-year budget documents.
“Next year we start all over again, so we’ll be back up to that same level of information that has consistently got us awards from finance managers for our transparency,” he said.
Surrey and Vancouver in B.C., and the Peel Region in Ontario earned top grades in this year’s report card, for clearly presenting the overall fiscal footprint of their cities.