Dear fellow St. Albertans, I hope you will be tolerant of my chronic annoyance over the City government’s financial cost of operating and managing our public transit system. Based on the current City budget, the cost of our public transit system has now risen to $25 million operating and $13 million in capital expenditures. The City also projects 1.23 million rides. That translates into a combined cost of $31 per ride.
While acknowledging that public transit in Canada is universally subsidized by property tax dollars, this level of cost just doesn’t make sense - particularly when compared to hailing a ride with one of our privately operated taxi services.
Isn’t it marvellous, however, that we definitely can expect this to be seriously addressed as our current council voted to have our six councillors designated full time in addition to our already-designated full-time mayor. And isn’t it interesting that the present council put off implementing the raise in the stipend so that it can be dealt with by the next council.
That will certainly need to be done budget-wise as the most recent City budget has allocated only a $140,000 increase to the Council expenditures to cover this cost while the annual increase in stipend will amount to $180,000. One wonders too if the additional cost of support staff, office space and equipment rental/purchase is being projected in the planned $344,000 addition in expenditures in the Executive Leadership budget line.
How comforting too, that the majority of the current councillors seem to be planning to run again so that the historical perspective can be maintained on this matter.
While it is easy to complain about the shortfalls and missteps of our current city council, we also need to be mindful that they do carry serious responsibilities. They are charged with overseeing a public corporation that has a combined operating and capital annual expenditure of just over $400 million – close to the equivalent of over $13,000 per St. Albert household. With the average St. Albert family paying 45 per cent of their annual income on taxes from all sources ($61,000 per family), our city council’s share amounts to 21 per cent of our total annual tax bill.
It is serious business to be a city councillor. Unhappily, given a term of office of four years as a recently proposed full time municipal official, we have created a serious problem in recruiting the skills and experience we need. The City of St Albert is a multi-million dollar publicly funded multifaceted corporation. We need active, experienced executive level citizens to be effective and knowledgeable governors.
With an $80,000 annual stipend – just over the average income of a St. Albert resident ($73,600) – we must rethink the idea of requiring our councillors to be full-time. Restricting the field to retired executives, business leaders, and aspiring entry level full-time politicians is not good enough for St.Albert.
