Calgary Minute: Municipalities Meet, Tax Emergency, and City Climate Costs

Calgary Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Calgary politics

This Week In Calgary:

• This week is budget week at City Hall, with a Special Meeting Of Council to discuss the "2022 Adjustments to the 2019-2022 One Calgary Service Plans and Budgets". The meeting will start on Monday morning and will likely last all week. Technically the meeting is just a continuation of the November 8th council, which is why the Agenda doesn't show today's date.
  
  
• For those unfamiliar with the City's budget process, things work very differently at City Hall than they do for Provincial and Federal governments. Rather than a government writing a budget, and then the Legislature voting it through or not, at City Hall it's the City staff and City Departments that make recommendations as to what the budget should be and then the Councillors debate whether the recommendations are good or not. Sometimes they will vote to do something different than what the City staff want, but often the recommendations are adopted mostly intact. You can see a high-level summary of what the City staff are recommending this year here, and the full list of dozens of documents and recommendations here.

• We'll be keeping an eye on the debate all week, providing our thoughts on the process and the decisions Council makes, including any changes they vote to make to the City staff's recommendations. You can follow our coverage on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Last Week In Calgary:

• Mayor Jyoti Gondek attended the 2021 AUMA Convention at the Edmonton Convention Centre, her first as Calgary Mayor. A number of issues dominated this year's AUMA convention including Indigenous Relations, Ambulance Dispatch, and RCMP contracts, but it was ultimately the issue of Ambulance Dispatch that took center stage with multiple municipalities calling on the provincial government to make improvements to the current system.
  
  
• Days. That's how short of a time it took for Calgary bureaucrats to announce that they need even more money in order for them to implement the goals in Council's Climate Emergency Declaration. Besides the Emergency Declaration itself, Monday’s motion also asks City officials to create and implement a carbon budget, and consider the climate implications of every single thing the City does.  If you thought the red tape in Calgary was bad, just wait for the green tape the newly elected Mayor and Council are about to tighten around everything.

• Speaking of which, we think the new Council should stop wasting taxpayer money on declaring an emergency on an issue that isn't within Council's jurisdiction and isn't within Council's power to fix. Instead, Council should declare an emergency on a pressing issue that affects every single Calgarian, every single day, is entirely caused by Calgary Council itself, and is entirely within Calgary Council's power to fix. We think it's time for Calgary Council to Declare A Tax Emergency and you can sign our petition calling on them to do so here.

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