Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolven
This is why the governments needs more profit centres and not just expenses. If the governments had income beyond just taxes then they would have opportunities to be more dynamic with their services.
City profit centre opportunities:
- Home building
- Realty/Realtors - The city could move into the market of supporting the purchasing and selling of houses and use technology to eliminate the legacy industry
- Commercial/retail building (under condos)
- Part ownership of the new arena - I know the ship has sailed here but the city should have taken a percentage of the revenues in exchange for the land and $$ investment
- Other??
Provincial profit centre opportunities:
- Senior's homes (within AHS) - provide exceptional service and a lower cost than the private home but do not make it free, the residents still need to pay
- Public Insurance (Auto) - If the UCP are moving to 'no fault' anyway, we may as well copy BC and move auto insurance to the public sector
- Other??
If our governments start operating more in these ways then it will start to become expected that they will behave in these ways when new opportunities come up. For example, if the city was already a land developer then when the arena conversation started the city would simply say "cool, we'll develop the land ourselves and rent it to you for your events".
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Some interesting ideas, but I find it hard to see any of them significantly increasing revenue compared what is currently raised through taxation (direct and indirect).
Here's a fairly simple idea that would raise some cash while driving a bunch of other desirable outcomes, and reduce certain expenses:
Congestion Pricing
Calgary is pretty well set up to implement this in the core, with 4 bridges crossing the river, and 6 underpasses, and 1-2 western access points (though really only one as the 5 Ave connector reversal would become unnecessary and be converted to a 'wheeling highway' and letting the current very busy MUP become walking only, but I digress)
- direct cash raised from this
- increased transit usage = increased revenue (also leading to generally improved transit service)
- it should be noted that there would be reduced parking revenue for CPA, but it's also worth noting its incredibly dumb how current policy encourages private parking lots in DT, but reducing parking demand can turn some of these private and publicly owned parking facilities into more productive assets, including housing (DT will become even more desirable to live in)
- reduced road expenditure across the board (all of the cars heading into DT use other roads to get there, so we could slow down road expansions that are already unnecessary, but I digress)
- health benefits from reduced pollution and making alternate modes more attractive
DBA would #### bricks, but I'm not sure that would be totally founded - some trips may redistribute around the city (fine from a broader civic standpoint), while alternate mode access should improve significantly.
And between Map Town and A&B Sound closing, there's really no reason to go downtown for anything other than employment, anyways (do we have a text colour for half-serious?)
A major unintended consequence would be shifting a lot of vehicle traffic to the beltline, but there would be ways to mitigate that