St. Albert council has been busy minding the pennies while failing to watch the store.
When the councillors were finished debating the 2015 budget this week, having hacked through more than 70 motions, the results were more or less the same as what they started with: a 3.3 per cent average municipal property tax increase. Counicllors are now set to pass their handiwork after two meetings of budget debate and a month of public meetings, departmental presentations and hundreds of pages of reading.
Along the way, and despite riding on the coattails of previous councils on big picture issues such as downtown redevelopment and a proposed LRT route, several members of this council appeared mired in minutiae.
Coun. Sheena Hughes is a fiscal hawk, and aggressively pursued cost cuts while bringing forward successful motions to install baseball diamond safety fencing and a spring and fall round of city-funded poop-and-scooping in St. Albert’s parks. Good for her. But she also dragged the debate down by taking issue with city administration’s revenue projections in departments such as legal services, police services and the economic development department. How might her assumed projections be better, you might ask. And so might we. City executives are paid experts in their fields (much like farmers) and provide that expertise when it comes to budgeting.
Mayor Nolan Crouse – often criticized as a micro-manager – carefully guided the budget process when it came to individual motions, making sure approval was clear to fund staff salaries or that outside agencies such as the library had funding specifically approved. But aside from suggesting that a future library branch be environmentally friendly, he failed to offer any dynamic forward-looking vision. He stick-handled council through the budget process, trying to keep debate above board, but always appeared as focused as an accountant on relatively insignificant issues.
Some councillors tried to innovate – Wes Brodhead managed to get water-efficient toilet rebates through and Tim Osborne added cash for youth outreach – but mostly council cut, or “unfunded” costs from proposed services. All of that unfunding still came out to the tax increase that was originally proposed by the administration, so if you cut from something that is only proposed, what have you really accomplished?
Sometimes, though, balancing the budget is just fine, particularly after boom years of devil-may-care spending. But when you compare this council’s performance to what is going on in Edmonton, you can see a big difference in attitude. True, Edmonton is much larger and so are its challenges, yet that city’s leadership has turned a moribund downtown into a beehive of activity in the past few years. During simultaneous budget deliberations this fall, the capital’s council questioned the need of a new police helicopter. It’s stuff that matters and that people can understand.
St. Albert’s own city manager has opined that our council needs to focus more on the longer-term picture when it comes to budgeting, such as developing a more realistic 10-year capital budget instead of debating a cobbled together wish-list of staff and council suggestions.
Politicians may have to watch the pennies, but that is not the main reason they are elected. Voters demand disciplined and visionary leadership. They don’t need a council to endlessly double-check addition and subtraction.
