Quote:
Originally Posted by iggy_oi
I was responding to this:
I consider this to be a silly statement. Nobody believes in not trying to be economically efficient and even under the best of circumstances the budgets of successful businesses increase.
The rest of the post was essentially trying to sugar coat the lack of substance behind continually pretending there’s enough fat to be trimmed to significantly improve the budget without significantly affecting services. Basically if curves or councillor McLean don’t care that services may be negatively impacted I think they should just own it instead of trying to convince us that it’s not the case.
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Budget's don't always need to be fully spent! This isn't just a city hall thing, it goes with companies, businesses and personal finance. If you find you have saved extra savings, does this mean you always need to spend?
Holding the line on expenses as much as possible, increasing renew/replacement cycles on equipment within reason, consolidation of office space, selling under utilized assets, reviewing corporate and city policy on things and more. Sometimes items just aren't in the budget and the costs,
can't be justified. Sometimes the logical thing is to actually spend money on the capital side for renew, replace, upgrade and more in order to save it on the expense side. That can be an effective strategy for lowering expenses.
The spin off affect of having budgets that aren't managed properly is having to increase costs across the board in a multitude of places, not like the 3.6% increase in taxes they are referencing.
If you know Calgary's budget, you would know that the city is facing SIGNIFICANT budget concerns related to a whole host of major projects ranging from event center, Arts Commons, BMO Center, a drawdown of reserve funds and needing to spend a significant amount of money for massive wastewater upgrades. In life there are nice to have's and must have's and they need to be clearly defined.
https://www.sprawlcalgary.com/calgar...tre-sprawlcast
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...%241%20billion.
Balance sheet strength matters in finance but this notion that City of Calgary can't reasonably cut expenses in order to free up added capital for more urgent projects and high priority concerns is not rooted in reality.