Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
I would like to see a summary of budget departements and programs with how much they cost vs how much reveue they generate. I was just glancing through a bunch of them. I didn't know that transit fares does not even make it to funding half of the transit budget.
Other highlights:
Community and Neighborhood services - Expeditures of $55 Million
Parks - $75 million
Recreation - $62 million (revenues of $32M)
Animal Bylaw Service $10M (revenues of $3.8M - I assume dog licenses and whatnot)
EMS services $44M (revenues of $38M) Looks like the fees and revenues almost match the budget on this one.
Fire - $135m - No one would ever cut that one
Social REsearch $2M - What's that?
REsource management - $17.8M - What's that, doesn't sound like a sound management of resources to me. 
Golf Courses - $9.0M (Revenues of $9.2M) Figures the one thing I might actually use I pay for fully with my user fee.
Perusing through this stuff, every department no matter who it is seems to have an amount of 2-4 million dollars dedicated to "Planning". Hopefully the planning is much more value added than the planning I have ever taken part in, mind you the worker bees also did the planning in those cases, didn't have a separate group to plan for us. |
I don't know what each of these is for and what each of these departments actually does...but the big expenditures on that list are things that should really be increasing, not decreasing (at least in my opinion!).
I'm surely not saying that the City of Calgary does a perfect job of allocating their funds, but show me an organization that does? I think that the city provides valuable things for its citizens. I recognize that recreation and the arts are easy targets..but think of how chopping the budget in these areas means closed hockey rinks and how that will impact the rest of the society. I'm going to say that with thousands of bored teenagers (and athletic ones at that!) running around you had better have some money to increase the policing budget!