CITY FACES TAXING TASK
There’s no simplifying the task city council has set for itself. Civic politicians and their high-priced help are meeting this week to reconcile a $146 million divide between the amount the city expects to take in and the amount it anticipates spending in the year ahead.
This chore isn’t an easy one. For starters, councillors recognized there’s no appetite for tax increases, so to put the matter on the back burner during the recent election campaign, politicians dipped into their rainy day fund to stave off a 2.9 per cent tax increase.
There’s some optimism the full brunt of last year’s foregone tax increase can be avoided, but that still leaves this year’s hike to be addressed, which had once been pegged at a whopping 4.7 per cent.
A proposal by city staff rolls back the property tax hike approved in the original 2015-18 budget plan to zero per cent.
Drawing upon all its fiscal acumen, the city now expects the shortfall to be $146 million, so that’s what they’ll turn their attention to for much of the rest of this week.
Coun. Ward Sutherland said he’s hoping to see any property tax increase kept to between zero and one per cent, taking into account the extra $14.3 million requested by police for additional officers and body-worn cameras.
“There’s going to be additional layoffs at all different levels,” Sutherland said.
“But the main focus has to be not taking away from core services, and we also need to be looking at what businesses we should be in as a city and shouldn’t be in, and contracting out.”
Calgarians should have assumed their politicians were making core services a priority each day, and not that such strategies were epiphanies that were only arrived at in moments of great desperation.
The same is true at looking for savings through the contracting out of services. It’s not Calgarians’ job to pay wages and benefits that far outstrip those available in the private sector.
If city hall wants to achieve financial success, it’s going to have to think bigger — way bigger. It’s proposing to cut 156 full-time equivalent jobs, but remember, the city’s payroll is 13,670 and it has an operating budget of $3.5 billion. In the real world, the one that relies on profits, Suncor sliced 1,700 employees and contractors from its payroll in 2015 with the hint of more cuts to come.
No Calgarian is looking for city workers to be punished. They simply want a solid financial foundation that a prosperous, caring city can be built upon.