Speaking Municipally

Mack Male:
No rubber stamp here. This week, the city council held its first public hearing of the term.

Stephanie Swensrude:
Plus, we're gonna talk about Vision Zero, P3 projects, and the upcoming budget adjustment.

Mack:
Hi. I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack:
Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, episode 333, which felt a bit like a milestone-

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
... 'cause it's a relatively big number, but, Stephanie, you also noticed it has some other important connotations.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Well, when you're an astrology girly like me numbers like this, these are angel numbers (laughs) and angel... And I looked it up, and angel number 333 signifies a call to creativity. Uh, the number sequence represents growth, balance, and harmony in relationships, encouragement in careers and financial abundance, and seeing 333 is a positive sign to embrace creative projects and trust in guidance from higher realms. I thought, "What a l- lovely number to have my first, I guess, official co-hosting episode 333." Um, but yeah, speaking of a call to creativity, that reminds me that we were talking about making some changes to the podcast.

Mack:
That's right.

Stephanie:
And one of those changes is that we are going to be retiring the rapid fire section.

Mack:
Yeah. There's a few reasons for this.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
One is that it's a lot of work to do actually.

Stephanie:
It, it, it's the almost... I would say it's the hardest part of prepping for these episodes. Dear listener, like, five minutes before the recording, you will see me, like, frantically typing and trying to think of something funny to say about the news, but not, like, making- poking fun at things that shouldn't be made fun of, and it is a very difficult thing to do, is be funny.

Mack:
Yeah. And, and thank you for doing that, and thank you, Troy, for doing all of that in the hundreds of episodes prior to you taking over that role. I've never really had to do this. I think I've done a very small number in my Speaking Municipally career.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
So it's a lot of work is one thing. It also feels a little bit misaligned with what Taproot is trying to do, right? Uh, we wanna inform you, and we talk about being reliable, intelligence, and all those kinds of things, and it's kinda weird for especially new listeners who might come to the podcast to all of sudden hear fake news really which is what the rapid fire is.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
And so, you know, those are some of the reasons behind the, the decision here. Um, there might be some other changes we'll make to the podcast in the future, some other format things, but for now, that felt like a fairly simple one, a little bit of creativity required, I suppose, to, to decide to make that change.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
All right. But the rest of the podcast, we still have lots of stuff to tell you about what council got up to this week, its first real week of meetings and some other things that have been in the news. But first, we have an ad.

Stephanie:
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Mack:
All right, Stephanie. Council is down to business. Kind of mostly done orientation now. First meetings taking place. One of the first here was a public hearing.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
What happened this week at public hearing?

Stephanie:
Yes. I feel like especially from the new councilors, they were trying to set the tone a little. They were trying to come in and make a good first impression or make a first impression. (laughs) Um, a couple things I especially noticed from John Morgan and Reid Clark. Reid Clark, Ward Nakoda-Isga. There was a rezoning in the neighborhood of Mayfield, so that's west end. It's not a mature neighborhood, but it's also not a brand-new neighborhood. It's kind of the, that middle donut, right? And there was a corner lot that's currently zoned RS, and they could have a 10-unit building up to three stories. And the developer wanted to rezone it to RSMH12, which would allow for more units and taller, but the the representative for the developer was there, and they said, "We still wanna have only 10 units. We just want a different configuration. We wanna do it with garage suites," which he couldn't do in the RS zone. He could only do it in this upzone.

Mack:
Is the idea there that it would allow the units to be bigger because they're in separate structures?

Stephanie:
Yeah. O- Well, here's the con- If we take the developer completely at his word-

Mack:
Yes.

Stephanie:
... the rezoning would allow him to, I believe, make bigger units with more bedrooms and in, yes, the separate structures because he'd be allowed to have more site coverage with these garage suites. But if the developer lied, he could make a thing of micro-suites with... I don't believe there's a upper maximum. It'd be essentially as many as you could possibly fit.

Mack:
On the face of it, you know, the trade-off between increased site coverage, which could be seen as a negative for people in the community or people in the neighborhood, and the benefit of larger units, maybe with additional bedrooms seems to me like a reasonable trade-off. This is a thing we've talked about before. We need more, you know housing options for families that have more than one or two bedrooms. So that would be a positive thing, I would think. But a, as you say, it kind of depends on is that actually what's going to happen here? So what did council think about that?

Stephanie:
Like I said, it really felt like trying to set the tone. So Councillor Clark was kind of grilling the developer like, "Why do you need this upzoning? If you s- want to do 10 units, you can already do 10 units." And because it was pretty much the first rezoning application of the term, I'm pretty sure every councilor spoke to it when they were doing the last, like, round of voting, which is not typical. Normally not every councilor speaks, but I think people wanted to kind of, you know, put a word out there. And everyone was like, "Yeah."If the RS isn't good enough for you, then, you know, too bad. You're staying with RS. And I think it was Michael Janz that said, "I like the RS zone." You know it- it allows for a lot of density.

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
It allows for the 10 units like they wanted to put in there. There were some... A lot of the councilors were talking about being a little bit more discerning requiring more proof than upzoning is actually needed in that particular law, and that it's actually proper.

Mack:
Yeah, I saw in the CTV reporting, there was talk of potentially another story, which again, would potentially be a negative to people. So they unanimously voted against this it looks like. So everybody on council. What was the comments like from councilors in, in that rejection of this rezoning?

Stephanie:
Few s- said this out loud in this many words, but many of them were thinking it.

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
"Uh, we're not just going to rubber stamp approvals for infill anymore. We're gonna be a little bit more, you know, careful." Um, I think Reid Clark actually did say something like that, which, you know, this is his ward. He was one of the... O- on, on the spectrum of infill, he's a little bit more on the anti-infill side. So yeah, I think we could expect to see a little bit more, you know, carefulness around infill, coming up.

Mack:
So there's a little bit of perhaps the new council responding to what they heard during the campaign and over the summer, you know, some anger about infill. Although, as we've talked about, it didn't really rise to be the defining feature of, or decision or criteria for people in this election that just finished. But, you know, it's something that has been on the minds of lots of Edmontonians. And so council, I can understand, would want to make it seem like, you know, it's not like we've thrown the rule book out and infill's gonna go ahead willy-nilly. Like, they- they've all actually talked about, and in the Tappan survey, talked about bringing in some stronger regulations to infill. And so maybe this is starting to feed into that discussion a little bit as well, that idea that we're not gonna rubber stamp everything, you know, implies that we're gonna, we're gonna make sure there's some rules and regulations here. Okay.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
So that's interesting. What else happened at public hearing?

Stephanie:
So s- kind of speaking of stricter regulations around infill... Okay, let's all go back to late June, early July, when council was debating changes to the zoning bylaw. One of the changes was to reduce the maximum number of units on a mid-block site in the RS zone from eight to six.

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
Listeners, you'll probably remember this. This was around the time where Tim Cartmel was trying to introduce a moratorium on infill. Remember that? Fun times.

Mack:
Right. Councillor Janz thought this might be a, a palatable interim approach or, or change.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
Yeah. Didn't happen though.

Stephanie:
Yeah, they put it to vote if they should keep it at eight, and that vote narrowly passed to keep it at eight. But council did approve a motion asking for a report outlining the implications of reducing the unit count, and also options and recommendations to reduce the impact of height on adjacent properties. Now, at the public hearing this week, Andrew Knack introduced a motion calling for the same thing, but essentially just changing the due date, A, and B, instead of saying, "Hey, what are the options of reducing from eight to six?" Just, "What are the options of reducing at all?" I don't know. It's just so weird. They're just... I- I was so confused. I was having deja vu. I was like, "Have we not already talked about this?" We already got a recommendation from administration, and administration recommended reducing from eight to six. I don't understand what's going on (laughs).

Mack:
So I noticed here, you mentioned there's just two small changes. It would come back sooner-

Stephanie:
Yeah, yeah.

Mack:
... quarter one next year instead of 2027, which I think we talked about before seemed like an awfully long time- (laughs) to get that report back. Uh, plus something about trees.

Stephanie:
Yes, so the fourth bullet on this motion was options and recommendations to support maintenance and retention of trees on private property. So, I am assuming that's going to be a, a private tree protection bylaw that they'll draft up, which we've also talked about before, and I think administration said they didn't really recommend it. But I don't know. This is my first time dealing with a brand new council, so maybe this is common, where in the first few months of the brand new council, all of these things get brought up to get re-litigated. What do you think, Mack?

Mack:
Well, we did hear that last time, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
It felt like the very first part of council was a lot of, as you say, maybe new councilors, and we had more new councilors last time, wanting to set the tone, show that they deserve to be here, you know, that they're gonna ask qu- good questions. And I remember Troy and I spent a lot of time talking about how we asked for an awful lot of reports, this council, right, this, the last council. Like, in their first part, they really asked for a lot of information about things that maybe didn't need a report or that maybe had already been decided. And I think some of the longer term councilors had expressed a little bit of frustration about that. That's perhaps not quite what's happening here, especially given that this is related to infill and is something that has come up quite a bit. But we shouldn't be making inquiries and re- asking for reports about the same stuff over and over again, right? In this case, if it's gonna come back sooner, we can get some action on that, that's a positive thing, and maybe that's really what the mayor was thinking about with this.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
But we'll have to keep an eye on that and see if this is something that councilors continue to do. You mentioned earlier when we were talking about public hearing, John Morgan, Councillor Morgan-

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
We talked about Clarke a little bit. What did you hear from Councillor Morgan at this public hearing?

Stephanie:
Right right off the bat, one of the first items on the agenda was some of the plans for Kendall, which is a new neighborhood down in the southwest, obviously, you know, very fast-growing area of the city. And this new neighborhood, Kendall, will be served by 41st Ave Southwest. Now, if you remember, that's what John Morgan, his first priority was, and he, he proved himself very raised, because right away he was asking about upgrades to 41st Ave Southwest. Now, if we back up a little bit, the Kendall... All of these plans for Kendall were actually approved, like, maybe a decade ago, a very long time ago, because as we know, these new greenfield developments take a really long time from, you know, annexation to first residence. It can be, like, 25 years, right?

Mack:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie:
So these plans have been approved for a long time, you know? And Councillor Morgan was basically asking, "Why were improvements to 41st Ave Southwest not considered before approving the, the plans for Kendall?"Because if we're going to have all of these new people moving into Kendall, there's going to be so many... so much more traffic on 41st Ave, and, yeah, like, like I said, that's one of the first things he wanted to address, and it's a legacy issue, right? It's like a... it's an unfortunate thing that council can't really do anything about it now. They can't really go back in time and approve changes, but I think he was trying to almost make a point and say, "Hey, I disagree with this." And another thing that he brought up, which was kind of tangentially related, but it... with these rezonings, there's a notification radius. So if you live within... I can't remember exactly how far. If you live within however far of a rezoning property, you'll get a little mailer.

Mack:
Yes.

Stephanie:
And being out in the middle of nowhere essentially, not many people got the mailer for this Kendall community plan, but he said so many people that use 41st Ave are going to be affected by this rezoning. So, you know, he was kind... yeah, I think I could see him being a bit of a thorn in the side as... about 41st Ave until he finally gets what he wants, which is upgrades to it. Uh, so yeah, I'm very interested to see where that goes.

Mack:
Well, I applaud the passion and the follow through from the councilor on that. I think that's a good thing. This definitely feels like one of those things that, hmm, is there something to learn here? You know, as you say, that neighborhood was approved a long time ago before probably 41st Ave was as busy and had as much traffic as it does now. I mean, the city has continued to grow in the Southwest, as we know, and so the need for that expansion or widening probably wasn't visible or apparent when that community was first being discussed. So is there something to learn from that about how we have discussions about potential new communities and approvals and things like that? Maybe, and maybe that's a good thing of the, the, the councilor to raise, but it also feels a little bit like there's not ton of value in re-litigating past decisions, and what you really gotta do is figure out what is the plan to go forward that you can rally people behind. How are you gonna get, you know, a bunch of your council colleagues to agree that widening 41, 41st Ave is the right thing to do, an important thing to do, worth funding, that the timing makes sense, all of that kind of stuff? So we'll see how successful the councilor is at rallying the troops, so to speak, on that.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Yeah.

Mack:
Well, thanks for bringing us a report on this first meeting. It's really interesting to hear how councilors are starting to interact and what they're gonna say publicly now that they're in the chairs. Did you notice... just quickly, did you notice anybody, you know, messing up with the, the voting or the time, the five minutes, all that kind of stuff?

Stephanie:
Um, a little bit. Like I, I won't, I won't name specifically, but one councilor s-... during the questions to administration period, they were trying to give questions to the applicant, which is a no-no. Like, there's all these little tiny rules that-

Mack:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephanie:
... unless you were already a councilor or a total dork like me that watches them all the time, you wouldn't really understand, but there... oh, gosh, there's so many little rules, and then all the, like, the closure of the public hearing, first reading, second reading, approval of the third reading, third read-... oh my gosh, I can't... there's a... indeed is a lot of orientation to go through. (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah, a bit of a fire hose for new councilors. Well, growing pains are to be, to be expected.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
And I'm sure they'll all get, you know, into the swing of that soon enough.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
Something that's not to be expected, I was looking at some news this week that we had curated about traffic safety, and new data from police show a total of 31 traffic deaths so far this year, 11 of which involved pedestrians, and that is the highest since 2016. Needless to say, Stephanie, it doesn't feel like we're on track to Vision Zero by whatever our last date was. 2032, I think, is what our goal was.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
The mayor has been talking about this as well. He has been in the news basically saying, "Yeah, this is a problem," and what he wants to do about it is create what he calls a city-led bylaw team that can go out and enforce traffic safety rules, and so he's talked about this dedicated traffic safety team. He's talked about it being modeled after a similar one that they have down in Calgary. And Stephanie, I just found myself... you were talking about deja vu earlier, and, you know, I kind of felt a sense of that here too. Like, we have had this team in the past. We had a safe mobility strategy from '21... 2021 to 2025, so probably due for a little bit of a refresh, and we've had a director in charge of this. Jessica Lamar, who as recently as the summer was in the news talking about some pilots that the city was going to run to try to address traffic safety in some of the, you know, especially in the playground areas, because we know that they made some changes to how they could cover playgrounds, partially, m- you know, maybe mostly due to provincial changes in, in funding for automa- and, and rules around automated traffic enforcement, right? So we used to get this money from photo radar that we put into traffic safety, and we don't get that anymore. Anyway, it's just like, we've had this before, so I don't really understand why the mayor is out here talking about creating this team as, like, as if it's a new thing that we haven't thought about before. What's your take on this?

Stephanie:
Well, I think that there are a lot of factors outside of the city's control. The two biggest things that I can say that I've witnessed... walking is my most common form of transportation. First is vehicle size. I am frequent-... I'm not very tall, and I frequently am shorter than the hood of trucks.

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
Um, even in the neighborhood of Strathcona where I live, people are still driving in trucks that are taller than me, that if I was walking in front and the driver wasn't paying attention, I would be under the car and die. So that's one thing is that the size of these trucks, and then you imagine obviously, like, a three-year-old child, like, that horrible case where the driver was coming out of the parking lot and a kid was in front and just...at the- and they- and the driver hit the kid. Uh, so that's one thing is that the s- the sheer size. And, like, there's studies that have been- that have shown that trucks are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more deadly. The other thing is, is that driver behavior... And I'll link this to cell phones, the amount of people that I see sitting in their car, holding their phone in front of their face. And also... Okay, so I was walking along 76 Ave yesterday and the day before, and there are a couple of, like, no left turn areas to discourage shortcutting. And I watched someone, instead of turning right, because you can't turn left, they went into the crosswalk and, like, went around the concrete pillars and stuff and turned left. So, I did what I do when I see someone making- being stupid while driving, is I gave them a thumbs down. And the passenger stuck her head out the window and said, "Can you be patient? We're learning."

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
Learning what? To avoid- to- to, um-

Mack:
Read signs?

Stephanie:
... ignore- to- to- to ignore signs? Hey, here's a lesson for you. If it says you can't turn left, you can't turn left. You turn right and you- and you find a different way to get ch- to your destination. So, those are the things is that like, one, vehicle sizes are ge- are so big and v- getting more and more dangerous. And second thing, like, people just don't care about pedestrian safety. People just are very entitled to the roads. They don't see the need to pay attention. Yeah.

Mack:
Yeah. I- I hear what you're saying. Definitely there are factors that are outside of the city's control. I wanna bring this back to the city though just a little bit.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
Because I don't think they do themselves any favors, and I think they contribute to this problem in a lot of ways. A really obvious one is all of the construction that people have been complaining about absolutely has an impact on traffic safety, because drivers are impatient. Something about getting behind the wheel, expecting to be able to go quickly, and then running up against construction means that when you do get a bit of freedom to go, you know people are racing around that construction to try to get through there as fast as possible. Or the frustration of having to go so slow for so long has a real impact. And so, I think drivers become a little bit frustrated, a little bit careless, and that definitely has an impact on traffic safety. I also think, though, the city bears some responsibility in these things. I know of several people who have called the city to complain about a problem intersection, perhaps where a car has gone over the median or over the sidewalk, to ask about what can be done, and they've been told by the city that there's not enough to make any sort of change. And then it happens again, and it's like the city's constantly evaluating these things rather than doing something about it. I feel like if we're gonna create this new team that the mayor is talking about, there should be almost like a hotline situation, right? A p- a- uh, Edmontonian sees something like that happen, and they make a call. Like, we'd dispatch the team immediately to try to go and figure out what is the quickest possible way to address this. You know, like how- how Alberta has the- the rat police, and they'll go right away and try to get rid of the rats? Like, we've got to do something about these common areas where drivers are... either the infrastructure is not well-suited to traffic safety or there's some other factor there. The city can do something about those. And so I hope this team, if it gets funded, and I think that's really what this is about, is funding in this upcoming budget, I hope this team has the ability to actually do some of that and not just fall back to education and, you know, driver safety awareness. Like, those things are important to do in an ongoing way, but they're not going to affect the kind of change that we need to get close to Vision Zero. Okay, rant over. This is a-

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
This is- this is a thing that I care about a lot. Like, it's really-

Stephanie:
We do.

Mack:
... important, and we don't do enough about this, and I don't like this, "Oh, we'll make a team, and they'll- they'll figure it out." Okay, moving on. I mentioned a little bit about how this is about budget, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
And that we need to have, you know, some- some funding behind traffic safety. Budget is coming up, and we've got kinda two budgetary things to talk about here. There's the process for the last year of the current four-year budget and then there's also some information we're starting to get about the next four-year budget cycle. Uh, and maybe one of the places where those two things come together is the news about P3s. So, what- what have we heard about P3s recently?

Stephanie:
Yeah. We'll just maybe touch on this quickly. Um, this week, council discussed a report that recommends looking at public-private partnerships for certain municipal projects, so that's stuff like new libraries and arenas, and there's a couple other, like, specific, transit center, fire stations, and stuff like that. And one of the examples was, like, the Woodcraft Library project. Andronak gave this as an example, where a private developer might agree to include a new library space at the base of a residential tower. Uh, he said, "We shouldn't shy away from getting an idea if there is interest in that. We have to make sure that we're protecting the service itself, that we're not losing control over the services."

Mack:
I think that's an interesting idea, right? And certainly we shouldn't turn away a developer who might want to put an amenity like that in their- in their building. I think if there's an opportunity to find a partnership that works for both parties, then- then that is appealing to me. But I do wonder about whether or not we need to continually look at new buildings. So, if the shift here is from we need to build our own mega centers, which is what we have been doing in the City of Edmonton in recent years, if we're shifting from that to, "Okay, let's do smaller scale stuff, but with private developers in these neighborhoods," I suppose that's a- that's a positive shift. But I'm really intrigued by what former Councillor Tim Cartmell has been saying about this actually, which is that, like, maybe instead of new spaces, we should look at renting existing spaces. So, he said, quote, "How many empty strip malls are we gonna have in 10 years?"I think that's worth exploring. I don't necessarily know if empty strip malls is the right way to go, but there is a lot of those kinds of, of spaces available that the city could look at. I think in both cases, whether it's the P3, you know, the base of a residential tower or c- or commercial tower or something, or whether it's renting an existing space inside a, a strip mall or something, really comes back to operations, right? So it might be cheaper to not build the $300 or $400 million recreation center that has a library as part of it, but what about the ongoing costs, right? So there's lots of smaller facilities will have different kinds of operational requirements and costs, and, and there's trade-offs to be made there. If we wanna build a 15-minute city where people can access things without having to drive or, or take multiple transit connections or otherwise get to these really large facilities, then there could be some reasonable trade-offs made there to have more of these smaller locations, especially libraries, which we know are so powerful as, you know, community hubs. And, and, and libraries now have taken on a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to, you know, serving as those central points in our community, so having more of those could be a really interesting thing. Um, I guess it will come back, always, to money and whether or not we have enough money. Um, but at least on this private developer thing, what has council decided so far?

Stephanie:
So, administration is going to issue a request for expressions of interest, which I think is even less, you know, bounding than expressions of interest. I don't know, it, it just seems, like, very preliminary. They're putting out the feelers of, "Is this something that private industry wants to do?"

Mack:
So in theory, we might hear from some developers who say, "Yeah, I wanna build a tower and I wanna put a library in it," and then we can explore that further. But otherwise, we hear, "There's no interest," and we don't pursue this further.

Stephanie:
Yeah. We're not gonna be having-

Mack:
I mean, that, that sounds reasonable.

Stephanie:
... the, the Booster Juice Library coming to a (laughs) coming to a street near you. I don't think so, not yet. (laughs)

Mack:
Not yet anyway. Okay. The other budget news this week is council has learned of a looming 6.4% property tax projected increase, part of this four-year budget that we are wrapping up, and council has approved the process for that. So administration will present the budget starting next week on November 24th with a couple of days for continuations. Council will get to ask questions of administration. And then starting December 1st, they'll get some presentations from external agencies and they can start debating amendments and discussing amendments to the budget. So it seems like they're aiming to have the 2026 budget fall budget adjustment finalized by that first week in December. And the documents now are out, obviously, if this is coming up on Monday. And Stephanie, you've been diving into these budget documents. I know it's early, but what can you tell us so far? What have you found?

Stephanie:
There are a number of changes on both sides, the operating and the capital. So for anyone who doesn't know, capital is one-time expenses. You know, we need to buy new buses, we need to build a transit center, et cetera. And then operating is paying for staff to staff (laughs) these things or paying for, you know, the trucks to clear snow off of the roads, et cetera.

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
The purpose of the budget adjustment for the capital stuff is usually, like, inflation or design changes have increased project costs. Or sometimes the budget is decreased because, let's say, oh, we got a provincial grant of $20 million, right? In the capital budget, there are a couple of projects that require additional funding than what was already approved in the four-year budget cycle. One of the largest ones was the estimated cost for the 137 Avenue and Anthony Henday Drive ramps project has more than doubled from $6.6 million to $14.3 million. The city in the report really blames the, the province. Uh, it doesn't go into detail about what this increase is all about, but it does... The, the administration did say, like, due to provincial requirements. And there's two fire stations that are also part of the capital budget, one in Athlone and one in Walker. They are both costing about 10 million more and, like, I think 13 million more respectively, and y- just because the design is going to cost more than they originally thought.

Mack:
I mean, you think about back at the beginning when we first approved this four-year budget, it was in COVID, so we had that, but inflation wasn't quite the same as it has been in recent years, so inflationary pressures are certainly there. And tariffs and, and supplier agreements and decisions about where we might source materials and things like that, that's all come up, you know, pretty emergent in the last couple of years. So not surprising to hear that there would be budgetary pressures on on the capital side of things.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
How about on operations? What did you spot there?

Stephanie:
There are a couple of unfunded service packages. Now, what that means is, like, throughout the year, let's say administration comes to council and is like, "Hey, you guys wanted to know about improving transit service. Well, if we bought 25 new buses and we paid to operate them, that would be great." And then council will go, "Okay, well, bring forward an unfunded service package and then come budget time, we will debate it then and see if we can fit it into the budget for the next year."

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
So some of those unfunded service packages include nearly $2 million to staff transit stations with safety attendants during periods of lower ridership. So, you know, they'd be there to help way find but also do Naloxone or to kind of be like the eyes on the street, you know, natural surveillance. Uh, $95,000 to support expanding the derelict residential tax subclass outside of the city's mature neighborhoods. So right now it's only really applied to mature neighborhoods. They wanna expand it outside of that. $2.7 million to make a temporary enhanced transit cleaning program, make it permanent. Up to $10 million to improve snow clearing and sidewalk repair, kind of make things more accessible and especially in, like, vulnerable communities, like lower income communities.Uh, $555,000 to reinstate the Infill Liaison Team, which insane that they ever took that away, but okay. (laughs) And then nearly three mi- million dollars to improve DATS and just keep the service levels for DATS high.

Mack:
Yeah. A lot of these things are going to be dealing with population growth pressures, right?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
The city has continued to grow quite significantly over this four-year budget, and there's greater strain on some of the services that the city provides. It's gonna be a big part of it. Did you spot anything about traffic safety since we've been talking about that, or, or not yet?

Stephanie:
I honestly haven't made it through the entire document yet. It is long. It's, like, almost 1,000 pages. I'm getting there. (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. We will, we will get there.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
We have several weeks of budget stuff coming up, I'm sure, to get into.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
In the past, we've seen some changes to the budgetary process so we have, you know, outlined what the dates are gonna be like here. But we've heard, you know, Mayor Sohi in the past come forward with these omnibus budget motions to try to streamline things and move things forward. Uh, I think we got the sense when we were talking to the mayor that he, you know, plans to continue some of the good things about the previous budgetary process. So I expect that we'll hear something like that from the mayor probably that first week of December when we get into putting the motion on the floor and amendments to the budget and things like that. Okay, well, there's lots of budget stuff to come in the next few weeks. It's, you know, it's Christmas soon, Stephanie, but budget is also a little bit like Christmas, don't you think?

Stephanie:
Yes, indeed. (laughs)

Mack:
So many good things to dive into. And this is where all of your r- you know, platitudes and ideas and visions, this is where the rubber hits the road.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
This is where a council can actually, you know, vote with their, their pocketbooks, as they say. I know it's not their pocketbook. It's actually, it's actually ours as taxpayers.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
But, you know, this is where they can follow through and put some money behind those things. So I think it'll be a really great discussion, especially for these new councilors. This is very much a, like, "Let's throw you in the deep end. We're gonna talk about budget, one of the very first things in your term." But it'll also be interesting to watch this budget in particular because, as we said, it's the last year of the current four-year budget. Next year, we get into a new four-year budgetary cycle and that is going to be quite involved. And so this is like a, a little bit of a teaser, a little bit of a taste of what's coming up on budget.

Stephanie:
And it's gonna be interesting because they're trying out the, quote-unquote, results based budgeting, which is another name kind of for the zero based budgeting, which I know, Mack, you have issues with, (laughs) uh, it being called that.

Mack:
(laughs) I mean, nobody knows what that means yet, right? Like-

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
... I think we'll see how the process works, but they're not starting at zero and then building up from there.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Like, that's just not feasible. So I guess that's why they renamed it.

Stephanie:
Yeah, exactly. Well, wha- just for all you nerds out there that want to know, like, over the next year, after this budget is approved, then they're gonna start doing these presentations to executive committee where they go through every department, or maybe it's every branch, and kind of outlines a presentation about the budget instead of coming with one big budget in the, in the fall. I'm not, again, I'm not 100% sure, but it's just gonna look different than it has in previous years.

Mack:
Well, I look forward to diving into that.

Stephanie:
Indeed.

Mack:
All right. Stephanie, we got closer to 30 minutes this week.

Stephanie:
I, I know.

Mack:
So that's good.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
I'm sure there'll be lots of budget stuff for future, but we'll try and keep it tight and on point. Thank you for bringing us your experience watching this first council at public hearing. I think that was super interesting. As we mentioned off the top, we're not gonna do the rapid fire, but we'll be back here in your ears again next week for another episode of Speaking Municipally. Until then, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.