Calgary’s city budget, that’s what.
It’s really easy to come to the taxpayer and have us fork over more cash to cover the shortfall.
It’s really hard to take a long look at the corporation that is our city and figure out whether it’s doing everything properly.
As of now, we have no way of knowing because there hasn’t been a deep soul-searching at city hall about what services it must provide, versus what services are nice to have.
Trimming administration a little here, while nipping and tucking at services a little there just won’t cut it.
Calgary needs a top-to-bottom accounting of what it does and whether we really need the city involved in all the activities it currently funds.
Do we need municipal golf courses? What about municipal cemeteries?
Are there savings by having the private sector collecting trash and recycling? Ditto for snow clearing and parks maintenance.
Are user fees too low? Too high?
Can we provide the same level of service while cutting city spending?
I wish I could tell you, but no one has asked those tough questions.
We chose instead to ask what Calgarians would like to have, as I explained in my Calgary Sun column.
Our City. Our Budget. Our Future. focuses mainly on which services we find important and which services we’d like to improve.
There is a portion of the report that explains how we’d like city department budgets to look like, but the original survey was devoid of the context of an imminent tax hike and unavoidable budget deficits. You can’t really get a proper answer without providing survey participants with this information.
As former Calgary alderman Sue Higgins told the Sun’s Rick Bell a few weeks ago, we need to bring back aggressive auditing to the city.
That’s the only way we can know if the huge sums of money we’re funnelling to city hall are being used properly — and whether the city deserves the extra taxes it desires to collect from taxpayers.