From the Calgary Herald – Nov 19, 2009

Pop some popcorn and slip on your comfy slippers –it’s City Hall budget time again! Over the next week (or two, or three), we’ll be treated to a lot of grandstanding, clumsy attempts at spin, a bunch of what-are-they-thinking moments, and, in the end, a budget increase that won’t really affect most of us.

What we won’t see is a thoughtful discussion on what services we need, what kind of a city we want, and how to address the systemic issues that prevent us from getting there.

Part of this is due to who we have on council.

From the Calgary Herald – Nov 19, 2009

First, it’s clear to me that we don’t actually have any fiscal conservatives on council. Or any effective ones, anyway.

Ald. Joe Connelly cried bitter figurative tears when council decided not to pursue an Expo bid it could not win–just pursuing would have cost $2 million, and the total loss on the event was estimated at over $1 billion. Connelly’s argument? Forget the money, since we could convince the province and feds to pay. He seems to forget that it’s all one taxpayer.

Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart studiously refuses to support redevelopment in her ward that would increase the property base and has recently been crowing about the need to hire more inspectors to rip out stoves in people’s perfectly safe secondary suites, thereby infringing on property owners’ rights, increasing city costs, and increasing the price of housing. What part of that is conservative?

And then there’s Ald. Ric McIver. While he often says the right things, it’s telling that in his recent media musings, including a column in the Herald, he has so far been unable to come up with one example of a taxpayer-friendly policy he has actually implemented.

(And while it’s nonproductive to belabour his long list of complaints against me personally, I did find it amusing that he seemed mostly upset that I lost an election five years ago, and that lots of folks ask me to run for something at some point in the future. McIver himself lost three times–two municipal elections and a provincial Conservative nomination– before finally being voted in. McIver has apparently been transparently lusting for the mayor’s chair for this entire term, but he refuses to publicly confirm this or announce his aspirations.)

Indeed, the single best recent money-saving idea –a drug court system that has saved taxpayers at least $9 million over the last four years–came from Ald. Druh Farrell, for whom the word “conservative” does not immediately come to mind.

But fun as this finger-pointing is, it masks the real problems in our system –council members who do not or cannot ask smart questions of administration (almost no questions were asked about the Park and Ride fee last year, for example, including whether it would be charged on nights and weekends), an antiquated system of budgeting (while zero-based budgeting likely would not work in such a complex system, there are many other systems which do not reward end-of-year spending binges and do not automatically confer budget increases), and a bias toward suburban development that, as one developer confided in me this week, could cost the city budget as much as $60 million per year in hidden costs.

The biggest problem, of course, is that the property tax is an antiquated way of funding municipalities and leads to these silly turf battles since it’s not pegged to inflation.

Changing this will take a provincial political party to propose eliminating the property tax and sharing income tax revenues with cities instead. Any takers?

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount Royal University’s Bissett School Of Business

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