Growth not to blame for city blowing budget

A few weeks ago I was reading a story where the City of Regina was explaining why the city blew its snow budget by more than $1 million yet again. The caption stated that “Regina’s growth and harsh winters” were the cause.

The city spokesperson went on to explain, “our budget and our activities are purely weather dependent” and listed numerous factors that impacted the city’s snow budget from equipment breakdowns and damages, to contracting out and storage site costs. As I continued to read, I noticed there were no actual comments explaining how growth contributed to the city exceeding its winter maintenance budget.

It is easy to assume that growth results in more roads, from which snow will need to be cleared at greater expense to the city, and therefore, this would be the reason for a cost overrun. However, I am going to suggest that as intuitive as this may seem, it really does not ring true.

This snow removal story ends up being just another example of how the city often defaults to growth when explaining why they have exceeded budget. They continue to suggest over and over again, and reinforce the message at every opportunity, that growth is a cost to the city. Not only is this not true, but seeing growth simply as a cost is a very limiting perspective.

First of all, I have explained many times in this article that in Regina, growth pays for growth. Community developers pay for the infrastructure that goes into Regina’s new neighbourhoods, including roads, sidewalks, parks, lighting, sewer lines etc. Growth also puts demands to expand infrastructure outside of the new neighbourhoods and developers pay for this as well, through servicing agreement fees collected by the city.

Second, not only is growth not a cost to the city, but it actually has tremendous benefit to the community, and that is the lens through which growth should be viewed. Regina citizens benefit from the growth of our city. Growth creates and maintains jobs. With Regina’s relatively recent prosperity, instead of youth leaving our city to seek jobs elsewhere, there are opportunities right here at home. Growth also produces higher wages resulting in a higher standard of living for our citizens. More economic prosperity creates greater potential to reduce unemployment, social problems and poverty.

Growth also provides a wider tax base for the municipality and the province to draw from with an increased number of homeowners and from an expanded and prospering business community. This in turn provides greater opportunity for the municipality to invest in improved public services and for the province to invest in services such as health and education.

Educational institutions also benefit from larger enrolments that create more opportunity to build improved programing for students and the community. Also consider the amount of heathcare professionals and specialists our city has gained from a growing community, where people are choosing Regina because of the opportunities that have been created here.

Even in the industry I represent, residential construction’s investment of over a billion dollars in the Regina economy over the past year has created thousands of jobs, millions in wages that showed up in purchases right across the entire regional economy, and millions of dollars in taxes and fees to fill government coffers at all three levels.

For the skeptics, ask how much more difficult it would be to raise the standard of living for Regina citizens without a growing community. No one should better understand the benefits of growth then us, because a couple of decades ago when people were leaving our city and our province, we were not attracting more doctors, we were trying to hang onto the doctors we already had. We did not have more businesses paying taxes, we had fewer businesses that had diminishing ability to pay increasingly higher taxes.

Some may argue that growth does not cover the future operating cost of the infrastructure in the new neighbourhoods. However, even this is not the case. For starters, from an infrastructure perspective those new neighbourhoods are cash flow positive. The infrastructure is brand new and will not require replacement for at least 30 years.

What about all those parks that have grass that needs to be cut? Then there is the snow removal question; what about all those new roads that require snow to be removed? Well, all those new roads that now need to be cleared have new residential and commercial properties surrounding them. That means for the City of Regina, new taxes and greater revenue to pay for those additional costs.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we blame growth as an increased cost to the city. It is time to change the conversation about growth in our city. Rather than talking about growth as a cost, it is time to look at it in the light of what it truly is — an investment in the future of our community.