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Originally Posted by Delgar
My impression, not greatly informed, is that Nenshi has backed up the civil service and refused to cut despite everything going on in the city. He says they'll maintain services and that's what the public wants.
I'm not so sure about that, I think people are looking to at least hear they are looking to find efficiencies or make cuts somewhere.
I don't think "Spendshi" is an accurate term for him, but there is a reason his opponents have attacked him with that.
EDIT: And hasn't he presided over the largest municipal tax hikes in Calgary history?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by crazy_eoj
How much is spending up under his entire tenure, not one specific year? Wouldn't that be more applicable?
I believe property taxes have increased almost 50% since Nenshi took over as mayor.
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Here's the key graph re: spending historically and projected (projected is now outdated since the downturn hit - but spending is flat from 2016 to 2017 - both inflation and spending for 2018, will be much more flat than projected here).
The red represents costs as they relate to inflation + population growth. Grey is the actual growth in spending in the operating budget.
You can see the positive trend over time that the gap between inflation + population and actual expenditure is widening. In other words, services are being delivered more efficiently per citizen and considering basic inflation.
A couple other things to consider, in the 3 years between 2012-14 alone, the city grew by over 108,000 people. Red Deer, the province's 3rd largest city took about 110 years to gain that much population, we tacked it on in three years. That puts enormous strain on services, causes all sorts of crazy cost escalations and so forth. Oh, and in the middle of that stretch we had a historically bad flood.
Second, is that a fairly large chunk of the "massive" tax increases in that timeframe related to the "taking" of the provincial tax room. Remember the infamous $52m? There was also a $42 million the year prior and a $11 million the year following. 100% of that went to capital projects - paid for goodies like the four major new rec centres, new central library, City's 1/3 Green Line LRT funding, preventing pool roofs from collapsing, roads optimization projects and so on. Since MSI had been tapped fully, there were virtually no other capital sources. None of these projects would have happened otherwise, full stop. But remember, 40% of your tax bill is provincial, so when they didn't decide to increase their take at all, the City used it for City capital, while your aggregate bill went up the rate it normally would have. Controversial? Yes. Necessary? I'd argue, yes because we were at serious risk of falling behind on infrastructure.
Those extraordinary increases on the Municipal side related to manufacturing some cash for infrastructure, not to feed operations.
Lastly, the Mayor and Council have absolutely driven cuts and aggressive efficiencies. In this last budget alone, about $118 million in efficiencies in the operating budget.
Also they have implemented the Zero Based Review system for every department in the City, that's yielded $10s of millions in savings. That was a Nenshi led project, and true change, not just cutting services, fundamentally improving their delivery. That's his McKinsey background at play.
http://www.calgary.ca/CA/fs/Pages/Pl...w-Program.aspx
As you do more of these saving money becomes easier. You can not just maintain, but improve service delivery with less resources. The other approach is the lazy, quicker and more politically expedient, which is to just simply cut staff and cut services, but is ultimately a worse approach.