Quote:
Originally Posted by Bunk
A couple things I want to address - first on the tax room - or as you characterize, a "tax grab".
Fair ball - if you want to characterize it that way, that's fine. But let's remember the context in which the City took the tax room and what it was used for. It's purely for capital projects - in a context where there are no new provincial grants, existing promised grants are being rolled back, and the Federal Gov't hasn't provided any help (an in fact yanked promised funding - $100m from P3 Canada for Rec Centres).
So, we had two choices - go back to the days of Duerr and build nothing and fall way behind in a fast growing city), or take matters into our own hands as a municipality and build.
People often laud the stuff getting built - which is this:
2011: $42 million annually created the Community Investment Fund, which is funding the new Central Library, 4 new regional recreation centres in NW and SE Calgary, 3 new library branches and maintenance and upgrades to parks, arenas, swimming pools, and other recreation facilities across the city.
2012: $10.2 million annually was distributed to five areas: $2 million for sidewalks (replaces the 50% resident share for sidewalk replacements), $2 million to improve transit system reliability, $2 million for targeted traffic congestion solutions, $2 million for lifecycle maintenance of City buildings, and $2.2 million for enhancing community facilities like community halls.
2013: $52 million for flood recovery (repairing things like bridges, roadways that the City will not recover from insurance or provincial or federal disaster recovery programs). Future allocation of this annual tax room amount is yet to be decided by Council.
Then some deride the ONLY method by which we would have been able to build any of those things.
On the question of City spending - while services have increased (snow removal budget, increase in police, etc) the per capita cost per citizen of delivering all services (operating budget) accounting for inflation and population growth is level.
The Mayor cut $108 million from the 2012-2014 operating budget and implemented zero-based reviews - which are now being done on the two largest business units in the City - Parks and Roads (about 5000 employees). It's a systematic method to improve service delivery and improve efficiency of that service delivery - will save us millions per department. Yeah, it's not an across the board slash and burn approach that's super quick, but those approaches don't ever affect real systematic efficiency.
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I am a fiscal conservative and I definitely do not want to go back to the days of "Build Nothing Duerr" I have no problem with major investments to infrastructure - namely wider roads and interchanges to alleviate traffic congestion.
What I will be critical of the current mayor about is the lack of:
- Cutting costs (bloated administration)
- Innovation in finding new forms of revenue aside from increasing taxes
- Stupid expenditures such as the big blue circle
Need to find more money to get stuff built.
And Nenshi needs to find effective ways to lobby the province and federal government for money for infrastructure.
He had failed thus far.