St. Albert city councillors say they plan to look for efficiencies as deliberations over the 2025 municipal budget begin.
If nothing changes, St. Albertans will be looking at a 4.0 per cent municipal tax hike in 2025.
A recently approved increase to the franchise fee the city collects from utility bills averted a 4.5 per cent tax increase. At 4.0 per cent, tax bills would increase on average by $34 per year per $100,000 of assessed value.
Based on Edmonton REALTOR data, that means an average single family home will see a $199.58 hike next year.
Not everyone is happy about the Gas Franchise Fee increase to 25 per cent, namely the St. Albert Chamber of Commerce, which wrote the Alberta Utilities Commission to ask them to block the change.
Coun. Shelley Biermanski is concerned about how the four per cent increase would impact residents with increasingly valuable homes.
“The percentage tax increase is only a small part of the picture,” Biermanski said. “With the dramatic increase to the value of homes, 4 per cent of inflated home values is detrimental to many.”
Figures provided to council by Fletcher indicate in 2023, the average cost of homes in St. Albert in 2023 were as follows:
- All single-family: $547,000
- Duplexes and semi-Ds: $445,000
- Row- and townhouses: $311,000
- Apartment condo: $283,000
Fletcher added the REALTORs Association of Edmonton currently pegs the average cost of a single-family home in St. Albert at $587,000 and average apartment unit at $245,000.
Biermanski added that though the gas franchise fee increase from 20.3 to 25 per cent mitigated some of the tax increase, those costs have simply been shifted to other ratepayers.
The draft utility operating budget is worth $54.6 million and would result in ratepayers seeing their bills increase by 7.2 per cent or $11.27 per month on average. The utility capital budget proposes $15.2 million worth of work across eight repair/replace projects and one that addresses community growth.
“The 7.2-per-cent utility increase in another cost,” Biermanski said. “With 81 per cent of the budget dedicated to day-to-day operations I feel it is important for administration to not outpace true growth.
“I would like to find further efficiencies.”
Coun. Sheena Hughes also said the gas franchise fee hike represents a shift of cost that “will impact our cost of living … in part due to another noticeable increase in wastewater rates. I will be keeping this top of mind as we move into budget decisions.”
Coun. Wes Brodhead said the draft budget “generally aligns” with council’s strategic priorities, which include growing the city’s employment base particularly by servicing the Lakeview Business District, and decreasing the number of residents spending 30 per cent or more of their income on shelter.
“A four-per-cent property tax increase is difficult in these economic times so I will be looking for some elements of the budget proposal that may be deferred and I will also be very reluctant to add any additional spending proposals to the budget ask,” he said.
Budget meetings will continue through October and November. If all goes as planned, staff expect council to pass the budget Dec. 17.
Mayor Cathy Heron said after the meeting Tuesday the proposed tax increase is “reasonable” as it stands, but that she doesn’t love percentages as a measure.
“Quite often I try to avoid using percentages because they kind of are meaningless,” she said. “A per cent in one community is completely different from a per cent in the other, but people tend to like use that as comparison.
“You know it's always a tough balancing game to do a municipal budget, especially with the continual reduction in revenues from traditional sources.”
St. Albert hosted the fall meeting of the Alberta Mid-Sized Mayors’ Caucus Oct. 16 to 18, which included a visit from Premier Danielle Smith and an unnamed uncounted cabal of cabinet ministers.
They talked about issues of common concern, including provincial changes that have hit their respective bottom lines, namely, how much photo radar revenue they’ll be able to collect, and how much extra next year’s municipal elections will cost without the benefit of automated vote tabulating machines.
Withering “government grants is the biggest one, of course, but fines in revenue is a huge one,” Heron told the Gazette. “We're losing the automatic traffic enforcement dollars, which is, you know, half a per cent increase right there.
“But I think it's reasonable. You probably saw the chart that says over the last 10 years, we've got pretty low tax increases compared to other municipalities and I think that really has a lot to do with the fact that our staff really do the most they can with a fewest amount of dollars.”
Data city CAO Bill Fletcher presented to council Tuesday show St. Albert has among the lowest operating costs per capita in Alberta. At $3,129, it's lower than Calgary, Edmonton, Parkland County and Grande Prairie.
Fletcher added that on average over the last 10 years, St. Albert's tax increases also are lower than those of Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Leduc, Edmonton and Calgary.
Heron was not alone in praising city staff for their faithful stewardship of the city’s coffers.
“I am pleased to see the efforts put forward by administration in the 2025 Budget that advance Council’s strategic priorities, maintain important infrastructure, deliver or expand services and programs while balancing the costs associated with our community growth, inflation and reduced funding from senior levels of governments,” Coun. Ken MacKay said. “I look forward to the discussions and rationale put forward by administration for the individual business charters.”
Budget 2025 includes 18 such business cases representing 14 new FTEs, most funded by assessment growth meaning their inclusion wouldn’t affect the proposed tax increase (see related story on page 20).
Coun. Mike Killick said four per cent is a “good starting point.
“The final ‘dollar amount is in the details,’ I am sure there will be many ‘puts and takes’ proposed and debated by Council before the final amount is decided,” he wrote in an email. “I encourage our residents to look at the budget document or even just provide their input via the Cultivate the Conversation website” which hosts the city’s budget 2025 survey.
According to the draft budget, significant changes to city revenues include:
- Gain of $4.5 million from sales and user fees to things like park rentals and utility rates
- Gain of $1.5 million in investment income
- Gain of $600,000 from new ambulance service contract with AHS
- Gain of $500,000 in franchise fees due to city growth and rate change
- Gain of $100,000 from license and fee increases
- Gain of $100,000 via transfer from reserves
- Loss of $1 million due to changes related to photo radar rules by the province
- Loss of $400,000 in transfers from two provincial programs
Significant changes to St. Albert operating expenses would include:
- Up $5.5 million due to required 1.5 per cent hike in transfer to repair/replace reserve
- Up $3.0 million relating “to corporate contingency and an increase to the City’s Recreation and Transit subsidy program to match demand”
- Up $2.1 million on government services, i.e. RCMP and Arrow Services
- Up $1 million on regular salary increases
- Up $1 million on increases to price of gas, electricity delivery costs
- Up $700,000 on contracted services such as the 2025 election, snow removal and IT
- $300,000 increase to library transfer and to election reserve
- Down $1 million in payments for land for Fire Hall #4 and Servus Credit Union Place
