Speaking Municipally

Mack Male:
Snow more money. This week, we dig into the 2026 budget deliberations. We'll help you understand what council decided on and why.

Stephanie Swensrude:
Plus, the old Royal Alberta Museum is one step closer to being saved.

Mack:
Hi. I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Both:
And we're...

Stephanie:
Speaking Municipally.

Mack:
elcome back to Speaking Municipally, Episode 335. Stephanie, it is the long promised budget episode.

Stephanie:
It is.

Mack:
We're gonna get into budget. We're not gonna be able to cover everything, because we do wanna keep it relatively tight.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
So we're gonna try and hit all the highlights and just kind of help people make sense of what council decided on.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
But a couple of things I wanted to talk about before we get to budget. You were saying this is kind of the first week of snow.

Stephanie:
I know. First week of December, first week of snow. What the heck?

Mack:
(Laughs) And rain too.

Stephanie:
Ugh.

Mack:
And that has made the roads very slippery, the sidewalks very slippery. It's been a bit treacherous out there, whether you're on foot or traveling by wheels.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
And I thought of Troy, our co-founder of the podcast recently, because I saw this news story about calcium chloride on the roads and this has always been something he's talked about on this podcast. Andrew Knack, our mayor, was in the news talking about the icy conditions, basically saying it's business as usual, and no, we are not going to start adding calcium chloride in excess amounts back into our strategies. You know, he said, quote, "It was not popular amongst Edmontonians. Even though it made a measurable difference in safety, folks were not keen to continue that." So probably sand. There is a little bit of salt in-in the traction stuff that the city does, but it's very minimal, among the lowest in Canada. No major return to calcium chloride, in case you were wondering.

Stephanie:
(laughs) You know, I was up all night last night thinking about it, so thank you for letting me know.

Mack:
I knew you would be. Yeah.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
We've also got an ad for you to start off the episode.

Stephanie:
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Mack:
Very weather appropriate ad.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
Uh, thank you to Park Power for continuing to support the work that we do. Tuesday this week was Giving Tuesday. This is the pushback against Black Friday.

Stephanie:
Okay. (laughs)

Mack:
So this, I don't know exactly when this got started, but it's been a number of years and it's become a really big opportunity for, um, charitable organizations to do another push for fundraising. Taproot is not a charity. We are a business, but we also participated in Giving Tuesday this week, and so I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who signed up to either become a member or who made a-a one-time contribution to us this week. We do have that ability to contribute now, so if you don't wanna be a member, maybe you're already a member, you just wanna contribute something else to support the work we do, you can now do that at taprootedmonton.ca/contribute. And we're very grateful for that. Of course, we're trying to build a ongoing long-term relationship with people, and so membership is our preferred approach, and if you're curious about membership, you can learn about that. We've updated our website recently with a lot more information about that. We would love to have you join us as a member of Taproot. All right, onto some of the news. Before we get to budget, there was another item that I just thought (music) we should do a quick follow-up on, Stephanie, and that is traffic safety.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
And so last episode or the episode before, we were talking about the various options. There was three that council was presented with and they picked one, right? What did they decide?

Stephanie:
So council voted to implement option two, an-an 11-2 vote, with Mike Elliott and Karen Principe opposed. So this plan is gonna cost $3.2 million and it will leave the TASER fund-

Mack:
The Traffic Safety Enforcement Traffic Safety Automation Enforcement Reserve. That's the one.

Stephanie:
Yeah, in a deficit of $4.3 million at the end of 2026, and it includes everything from the full expansion plan except for traffic safety peace officers.

Mack:
Right. So they had this series of different enhancements, they called it, to traffic safety that would have come from these various options. The larger plan, which is almost $6 million, the- the main difference there is it included additional hours for enforcement by peace officers. They've decided not to do that. So I was curious, like, what do we actually get now (laughs) for this for this $3.2 million with this option two that they picked? And as far as I can tell, Stephanie, there's three things. So one is increased advocacy. So they're already doing this, but I suppose they're gonna try and do more of this, advocating to the province to change its mind about auto- automated enforcement, about photo radar, those sorts of things. Um, but in particular, they wanna look for exemptions to speed on green enforcement at 16 high-risk intersections. So these are intersections that they've identified are particularly dangerous. We wanna bring back cameras that allow us to give tickets to people automatically when they speed through those intersections. The second one is some sort of engineering bucket, you know, things like infrastructure near playground zones, and the city talked about a couple of examples of things they've done there. The goal here is to reduce traffic volumes and speed, especially through those really important areas. I'm constantly amazed dropping my daughter off at school how many people zip through the neighborhood. Very clearly a school, very clearly kids all around. Uh, and then the third bucket, they call enhanced maintenance.... some of this is just more data and analytics, as if we didn't have enough data to understand the problem. But okay, maybe there's some things we can use there to be more proactive. And then the other thing is, they mentioned some things around a pilot, we love pilots, to add traction material near schools, so different ways of making the roads a little bit safer near, near schools in particular. And then additional capacity. We don't know exactly what this means, but additional capacity to improve public response. And so this is kind of the, when people complain about traffic safety, can we actually do something about it?

Stephanie:
So this was actually talked about during budget deliberations this week. A big issue with this debate was, where the- should the funding come from, 'cause I think everyone in- on council agreed that this is a issue. But the city doesn't like to fund things based on fines, because the idea of this program is that fewer people speed and do other traffic violations, but then that means that they'll get less fines, and then the funding to have the team will go down. So it doesn't make sense, fundamentally. There was also some discussion about, "Well, let's do this in 2027 like the next four-year budget cycle." Uh, which I can understand the thinking behind that, because it's like we'll have kind of the big pot to work through. We were not going to be scrounging for scraps, and we're not going to be, you know, scraping the bottom of the barrel. But it did end up passing to have this funded this way. A couple of notable paraphrased quotes I will bring out is Council Joann, Joanne Wright said, you know, about waiting until 2027 is that, "We can't wait another year, another 30 deaths." And you know, this is one thing, not much that gets talked about at council is life or death. Some of it is, don't get me wrong. For sure some of it is, but I don't think, you know, bus funding is not life or death. Sidewalk repair is not life or death. But like Vision Zero is quite literally life or death. And, and also Mayor Nack, he acknowledged that the funding source isn't ideal, but he kind of had the same idea of like, yes, this will put us in a bad financial decision, but I feel like we have to do it.

Mack:
Okay, this is probably a good opportunity to just clarify something they, they did here with this. So there's this budget series of meetings, and there are obviously the main budget motions and amendments, but there's these other ones. And so on this traffic safety one, what I mentioned, the decision to go with option two, that 11 to 2 vote that you talked about that was a motion in response to that report. And option two didn't include the peace officer stuff, but it did, it did say that could be considered as part of an unfunded service packet at package at budget. And so the one that you're talking about, where we had Council Wright and Council Nack- or Mayor Nack saying, you know, "We can't wait. We've got to get this done, and, and how are we going to fund this?" That is a motion that was made as one of, part of these budget amendments, and so this is basically the consideration of that unfunded service package. And that one is $5.8 million. That funding, as you're talking about, comes from the fine revenue. So the idea here is we're going to pay for these people because they're going to be out there issuing fines and increasing enforcement. This means we're still gonna end up with a re- a deficit in the reserve that will still need to be repaid at some point. That's probably gonna require a tax levy increase in the future, but it doesn't directly impact the 2026 increase here.

Stephanie:
Yeah, exactly.

Mack:
Okay. We've got one of these things sorted out.

Stephanie:
Yes. Budget can be so confusing because there's all these different funding sources, and then they make little amendments to the amendment. So it can be, it can be a little bit hard to wrap your head around.

Mack:
Absolutely, and it's an ongoing process. We've been tracking this. You've been listening to the city council most of this week.

Stephanie:
Yep.

Mack:
And, and they, they update these tables, but it's just a PDF document that we have to try and parse. So it's a little bit challenging, but we're doing our best. We're gonna get into more of those discussions, but I thought an interesting bit of framing around this was a, a story that you highlighted the other day, this uh, report that council got as part of all of the preparation for budget that our population is rapidly growing, as we know, and could get to 1.25 million people just in the city of Edmonton, not the region, but just the city of Edmonton, by kind of 2027. So quite a bit earlier than the city plan originally predicted. And we got an update from Deputy City Manager Kim Petrin. She said that the population of Edmonton has grown by 100,000 people from 2022 to 2024. That's a 10% increase in just two years.

Stephanie:
Hmm.

Mack:
This growth is continuing to accelerate. They think it'll start to slow down a little bit over the next decade, but we still have quite a bit of growth to go. And so I thought I'd bring this up just because this is kind of the pressure that is driving all of these discussions at budget, right? They're talking about new buses, and they're talking about increased service, and they're talking about pressures of growth, essentially. Uh, it comes from this really rapid growth. And, and it's like, yeah, it's great that we are growing. We want Edmonton to be a growing place. But that does have additional costs that council needs to deal with. And so if you were thinking council was gonna talk about budget this week and we were gonna see decreases, not likely because of this pressure. It's pretty hard to go and cut the budget significantly without real implications when we're adding, you know, 100,000 people every two years. They all use transit. They all use roads. They all use services that the city has to pay for. So with that context, let's get into budget, Stephanie.

Stephanie:
Yes, let's talk about the budget. Yeah, like you said, I've been listening to it all week, and I'm kind of going cross-eyed. Um, (laughs) but let's talk about the context. So the baseline for 2026 was 6.4%. That's what administration proposed. And then what happens in pretty much all municipalities is that the, is that the city council will make little changes here and there. They might cut something that admin has proposed. They might add something that admin didn't want to have added in.

Mack:
Yeah, and as a result of all of those decisions and debates and amendments, they get to a final number. They've done that now, so we know the increase for 2026 is now 6.9%.A big chunk of that increase comes from one thing in particular, which was Explore Edmonton, right?

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
So it's about 0.47%. They've ... What did they decide to do here? Like what, why is this a, a significant factor?

Stephanie:
Well, we've heard about the issues of Explore Edmonton not having enough funding for years. Um, there's about a $11 million annual gap in funding for Explore Edmonton, so they've decided to fund that on an ongoing basis instead of just giving them a little like a, a grant, I guess, every single year. They've just decided to provide more stable funding. And of course, the idea beh- behind that is for every $1 you invest in Explore Edmonton, you get X amount back with financial gain from events being attracted here and tourism and, you know, that sort of thing.

Mack:
So anybody who's been supporting Explore Edmonton will be pretty happy to hear that news. This is, I think one of those things that council looks at as kind of an investment in future benefit essentially, right? Like we're w- we're not gonna get anything for that money directly today. It's not the same as, you know, hiring more peace officers who you see out on the street tomorrow. But in theory, this helps that organization fulfill its mandate, which grows things overall. Uh, the other bit of increase, another one that came that stood out to me was some increase to ensure that transit cleaning staff are paid a living wage. And I thought that was interesting 'cause it's one of these knock-on effects of past decisions. It's obviously, I think, a good decision that we have a living wage policy and we gotta make sure that everybody who works for the city is paid i- in accordance with that living wage policy. So this is a smaller increase, but still has a, a bit of an impact on, on that increase. I wanna ask you about some of the other decisions that council made, Stephanie, but we should of course note for listeners, there are two budgets here getting discussed. One is the capital budget and one is the operating budget. Let's start with the capital budget. Any cuts to the capital budget pretty unlikely to change the tax increase much for 2026, but it ... You know, if they cut some money from the capital budget, they could potentially have more money to spend on capital projects in the future, so that might be interesting. Uh, but in the capital budget amendment tracker, the latest version I saw, they had four amendments to try to decrease the capital budget, all of which failed. And they had five amendments to increase the capital budget, one of which passed, which was $25 million for buses.

Stephanie:
Yeah, 'cause uh, for ... To, to reach Edmonton's growth needs we need 99 new buses and they paid 25 million for 25 new buses. That's a million dollars per bus. Uh, math whiz over here.

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
Um. (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. So not ... (laughs) So as you say, math whiz, 25 is not 99.

Stephanie:
Yes.

Mack:
But these are for high priority areas they said, right? And so these are kind of like this is the bare minimum we need to do. And, and they, I think, also talked about renewal, right? There's hundreds of buses that are gonna be due for renewal soon.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
So we're gonna hear more about, about bus funding. Uh, this $25 million for new buses, this is a capital change. Capital almost always has an operating impact, right? So when you buy new buses, you need people to clean them and drive them and maintain them. And so there is a corresponding operating budget item for this. It's about $420,000 a year. And, and that's the connection between the capital budget and the operating budget. So on the operating side of things, that's where most of the interesting conversations happen. That's how we get to that increase for 2026. I looked, the last time I saw, there was about 39 amendments. 15 were for decreases. Um, the rest were for increases. So there were some attempts to, to lower the tax levy here, but more attempts to add things to the tax levy.

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
Some of these were restated a bunch of times or withdrawn or they make changes throughout the process.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Conversations happen and, and they make some changes, but, you know, there was at least six or seven big ones that, that did pass. So let's start with the cuts. Maybe you could give us a sense of what did council try to do to reduce that tax levy increase?

Stephanie:
There were a couple of things related to transit that Karen Principe introduced to get the budget down, and one thing I'll quickly say here is that if we're think- if we're thinking about Better Edmonton, Mike Elliott was the seconder for a lot of her motions. So I can, I can kind of see that little coalition, if you will, forming there. So it's just a little fun fact. Um, but yeah, so the addition of an integrated transit control center, she tried to cut that, was alone on that. She tried to cut, um, there's a little project going on to replace bike racks on buses, which would be able to hold fat bikes, kids bikes, and e-bikes. She tried to cut that. That failed with her, with Principe and Elliott voting to cut it. Uh, that was one thing where the city was getting a federal grant to cover a bunch of the projects. They were like, "Yeah, we should do it. We don't wanna leave federal funding on the table." But Principe's line of reasoning was we shouldn't get a grant and then see what needs to be done. We should see what needs to be done and then get the grant, which I guess makes sense. And then the last one was to get passenger counters for train cars. She tried to cut that, and that was like to have better data to see how many people are riding trains because they have automatic counters on buses so they can have like really good data on that. But, um, they don't have the same for the train, like the LRT vehicles. And that also failed. Uh, Karen Principe, Mike Elliott, and John Morgan voted to cut that and, and did not ... Was not successful.

Mack:
So those three or four projects you mentioned you know, 7.3 million, 2 million, 1.2 million, like it would have added up with some of these changes but at what cost essentially?

Stephanie:
Mm-hmm.

Mack:
And so, you know, whenever councillors come to budget and they try to make these decreases-They might genuinely be interested in cutting those projects for some reason. Other times, I think they sometimes make those motions to make it look like they tried at least to lower the budget. Uh, but regardless, you got to get support, and one or two votes in favor is, is just not going to get you there to make that happen. Uh, she also, if I r- uh, if I'm understanding correctly, tried to cut the demolition of the velodrome.

Stephanie:
Yes. The project to demolish the old velodrome, it'll cost $3.2 million because it's getting replaced by the Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Center. Uh, and she actually got more support on this one. She got support from Mike Elliot Ashley Salvador, Anne Stevenson, and Karen Tang. So to use a phrase from Mayor Knack, another classic eight-five split, because yeah, that's-

Mack:
Absolutely. (laughs)

Stephanie:
... like a total, total graph fake. But it, which, and this is so strange to me, because especially with Ashley Salvador, i- in her ward is the colosseum, which they delayed demolishing, and now they have to pay so much more. So I'm really surprised. So Anne Stevenson, though, brought up that she doesn't see any urgent need to demolish the site because it's being leased out to a soccer club with no issue. Um, she just wants to maybe look for partners to take it on as is but they, um, are kicking the can, or maybe kicking the soccer ball down the road, that will, that has backfired in the past, like the colosseum.

Mack:
Yeah, so this is definitely one of those spend the $3.2 million now, and yes, it's a bit painful, but it's only gonna go up. It's only gonna cost more in the future. So that failed, so that means we are demolishing the velodrome, correct?

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Okay so that was another attempt by Councillor Principé to decrease the tax levy. There was one other decrease that I think passed, right, and this is related to the Old Strathcona Public Realm Strategy Reserve, and actually, this isn't so much a decrease as a reallocation. Uh, but what they did essentially approve here is instead of $438,000 in essentially parking revenue from that parking lot that's across Gateway Boulevard from the Old Strathcona Farmer's Market, instead of that being dedicated to a special reserve to just pay for stuff in that area, that will now be released back into general revenue.

Stephanie:
That's correct. The vote was seven to six, and the motion was to move the money into the general revenue. So the, those of the, the councillors that wanted to see the money from that parking lot go towards Old Strathcona for Andrew Knack, Mike Elliott, Michael Janz, Erin Paquette, Ashley Salvador, Anne Stevenson. Uh, some interesting comments about the issue of fairness, because there's really only two, maybe three wards in Edmonton that have, like, paid parking lots such as this. And some of the councillors were bringing up, "You know, it's not fair that we take revenue from this one parking lot and then just dedicate it to this one thing, because that policy can't be applied across the whole city." But I mean, what about the fairness of... So I, you know what, I live in Strathcona, so I'm gonna be a little bit opinionated here, but what, what about the fairness of all these cars coming in and, um, parking in our neighborhood, and, like, making it so busy here, which of course is, like, a good thing, but still, and then all of the money from that very popular parking lot, it doesn't go to improving the neighborhood of Strathcona? I don't know.

Mack:
I think the fairness argument is completely ridiculous, because there's only so many parts of the city that have on-ramps to the Anthony Henday, but we fund those. There's only so many parts of the city that have gigantic rec centers, but we fund those. Like, there are lots of things that we fund that are only applicable to certain parts of the city. So I don't buy that argument really at all. (laughs) Uh, the other argument I saw in relation to this that I'm a little bit more sympathetic to is just, you know, the, the overall budget pressures that we have, some of those come from constraints that the province has put in place, and so do we really want to be putting our own constraints in place? And this is an example of a budget constraint. We do this all the time, of course, right? Uh, this is what our CRLs are, they are budgetary constraints. We are dedicating that revenue to a specific area. So you know, I, I can understand a little bit better the argument that, "Well, in this time where budgets are pretty tight and we're looking for every bit of additional revenue we can get to lower the burden, maybe this isn't the right time to explore this other approach." But I don't think the the fairness argument has a lot of weight in my mind, same as you, Stephanie. And I don't live in that neighborhood, so I have a little less bias than you may be on that one.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
All right, well, what are some of the other additions, then, that we saw? So we've kind of dealt with some of the, the attempts to reduce the budget. What are some of the things that people either tried to or successfully got added to the budget?

Stephanie:
Okay, I'm gonna try to go through this relatively bang, bang, bang. Okay, Karen Tang tried to introduce a package to do renewal on arterial roads. Would have cost $5 million, and it lost 4-9, with Michael Janz, Erin Paquette, Erin Rutherford, and Karen Tang voting in favor. And then she also wanted to do planning and design to widen Parsons Road for $600,000, so that would not be to construction, this is just the planning and design. Um, and Parsons Road, I don't know if there's any South Side people out there, but it is honestly kind of r- kind of crazy that it's still one lane. Uh, but guess that's why-

Mack:
In some parts, yeah.

Stephanie:
In some parts. Uh, and that lost 2-11, with Erin Rutherford and Karen Tang voting in favor. Now a couple things that did pass I have just here in my notes that $25 million for new buses, um, and then also there was a package to improve the service level for DATS. Uh, that was about $3 million, and that also passed unanimously, and that'll be u- uh, that'll be funded using money from the EPCOR dividend.

Mack:
So that one is an increase, but doesn't really a- pa- affect the tax levy, because we're funding that from this dividend rather than, you know, adding to our, our 6.X% increase that they were working on.

Stephanie:
Yeah.There's another motion to reinstate the Infill Liaison Team, which I l- listened to this meeting. I got to learn more about what this team was, why it got taken away, where those people have gone, and like why on earth they would do that. So I guess what happened back in 2021 when they were doing the zoning bylaw renewal, so the Infill Liaison Team s- started in about 2019 when we started to see more like skinny houses and stuff like that, and it was to kind of do the change management as city administration calls it, to, you know, help neighbors kind of deal with these and be like a liaison between the construction workers and the developers and the, the people living there. But in 2021, they had to move those people to actually work on the zoning bylaw renewal and district planning, and now that work is not done, but the bulk of it is done. So now they're, they want to be, you know, re-establishing this team. So they voted council voted 10-3 to spend $556,000 to reinstate this team. Uh, councillors voting against were Mike Elliot, Karen Principe, and Aaron Rutherford.

Mack:
So the Infill Liaison Team is back.

Stephanie:
Yes. I, let's, let's liaise. Um, (laughs) another one is bus cleaning. So like i- i- enhanced bus cleaning, though apparently it's not actually really enhanced, it's just getting it to like the normal level. That's what some of the councillors were saying. Uh, $1.2 million, that was, that passed 11-2 with Karen Principe and Mike Elliot voting against that, and then Aaron Paquette introduced a couple of kind of strange or audacious, I don't know motions, and I would say Mac, you added th- these in the notes document. Did you want to talk about them?

Mack:
Well, I thought the one from Councillor Paquette was pretty interesting. It was a, a bit of a like let's rip off the Band-Aid- and replenish the Financial Stabilization Reserve. So this, I think, would have increased the tax levy increase for 2026 to about 9%. So it would have been a quite substantial increase, but it would have fully replenished our rainy day fund, and, and his argument was like let's just take the pain now, rip off the Band-Aid, get it done instead of, you know, figuring out a w- way to do this in the future. And I can under- understand the logic of that, right, and, and especially it's year one of a four-year term.

Stephanie:
True.

Mack:
Politically, this is a good time to do that kind of a thing but it failed 12 to 1.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
He was the only person who voted in favor of that one.

Stephanie:
Yeah, so to, he has this motion that funding for structural budget variances as detailed in these reports be approved for the following amounts, so 27.7 million plus 11.1 million. Uh, so what is that, so 38 million (laughs) ish, something like that. Sorry, quick math. Math was over here. Um, but to, and then take that from the tax levy. So essentially he's saying let's increase the taxes to cover structural budget variances, which is just like something I've never seen in my time covering council that, doing something like this. Again, this is one of those like weird confusing things with council budgets. So yeah, well, I don't know, what are your thoughts on that, Mac?

Mack:
I mean, it's just a similar kind of let's, let's just try to do some of the painful stuff now.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Like let's just deal with it, I think was how (laughs) Councillor Paquette kind of went into this budget, and he got a little bit more support on that one, right?

Stephanie:
Yes, he had, um, Michael Johns and Aaron Rutherford join him on the team.

Mack:
Still did not pass though.

Stephanie:
Yeah.

Mack:
Uh, another one that stood out to me was from Councillor Stevenson. So this was about another reallocation more than an increase, and so when we approved the, the Downtown Pedway project, we, at the time, council had said, "You know, you should put operating stuff alongside these capital requests." You know what I said off the top here, like there's always an operating implication of capital. And so it was for, I think it was for a couple of peace officers, right, and maybe a vehicle were included in this operating funding, and and Councillor Stevenson in a way was trying to untangle that past decision and say like, "Mm, maybe we shouldn't do this now," and, and put forward the, the motion that would have reallocated this, and it failed 9 to 4, and she didn't even vote for her own motion in the end. Uh, Councillors Clark, Morgan, Rutherford, and Tang were the only ones who, who voted in favor of that. So, you know, there's a past decision that maybe circumstances changed since you, you go with those uh, original approaches and then you want to make a change, and, and in this case it didn't work out.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I was listening to this discussion and it was a lot more thorny and didn't actually really represent what ended up being posted on the city's website. So, that's what you get from listening to council for hours and you get a little bit more context around the decisions being made. So what, what I gathered from the conversation is that there was this package that it was going to add two peace officers and a car, and it's for one pedway, right? So that seems a little bit ridiculous and I think it was like $500,000 annually, but city admin then explained, "We need $500,000 for these things across all of the pedways downtown, and this is our way of getting it by tying it to the 103A Av pedway," and that was what the issue was. And it's so funny because there was, there was a couple councillors specifically that said, "I know that there are reporters here listening to this, and I really hope that they don't go with the headline, 'Council approves 500,000 for da da da da da.'"

Mack:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
And I was like, "I will not do that." (laughs)

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
Um, but yeah, so it was another one of these weird thorny things, money moving around, and yeah, but then in the end, it didn't get passed. But I think, I'm assuming there's going to be some sort of subsequent to get that but have it under the right umbrella, so to speak.

Mack:
Yeah, we, we might dig into subsequents a little bit next week. That's the other part of the process that always happens here on, on budget time, is we get all these amendments to the main motion. That big main motion gets passed. That's how we end up with our approved tax levy increase. But as a result of all of these discussions, there tends to be a lot of what are called subsequent motions. These are things that council will put forward and vote on for follow-ups. Um, these could influence future budget discussions, for example.All right. Well, there's a lot more detail that I'm sure we will be unpacking in the days ahead, and we can watch for your great reporting on that, Stephanie, at Taproot Edmonton next week. But, you know, now that you've listened to all these budget conversations throughout the week, you've heard all of the amendments and discussions and the, you know, things that councillors have brought up, maybe a good time to just quickly check in, what's your assessment of our new City Council? How'd they do on, you know, what is really their first big, big test here?

Stephanie:
Yeah, I think that the vibe was overall pretty collaborative and respectful, which is great. I did notice towards the beginning of the week, it was a lot more of the incumbents kind of guiding things, introducing the motions. But then towards the end of it, um, it kind of seemed like the newer councillors were kind of getting more, more brave. Like I think that it, it must be like you must get stage fright almost talking at these meetings. Like I, I certainly would. Um, and kind of getting brave and really speaking to the issues. And I was, that kind of heartened me to get to watch people kind of step into the role. I, I love that. I love seeing people passionate about their communities. Um, and then s- another thing that I noticed is just a little bit more, I guess, austerity among some councillors that I wouldn't have noticed before, especially the specific people that I would point out were the Aarons, Aaron Rutherford and Aaron Paquette, is that they seem to be a lot more austere this time around. Uh, Aaron Rutherford was voting almost for every, like, issues, either voting for the reduction or against the increases, um, for a lot of them at least, and just seemed very against increasing the tax levy, which is, you know, a big, a big disci- discussion.

Mack:
And Paquette, aside from his attempt to bump it all the way up to 9% similar, similar vibes?

Stephanie:
Yeah, and just that I you know, I was getting kind of a yes uh, a mismatched vibe, you know. S- on one hand he was trying to increase it to pay for that and on the other hand, he was voting against other increases. So I don't really know what to make of that. (laughs)

Mack:
Yeah. Rutherford talked about this in her closing remarks actually, when she spoke to the, to the budget on the final vote. She, she said she was really hesitant actually to support the budget. She didn't support a lot of the amendments, as you said, Stephanie. And so she wasn't sure if she could support the overall budget. She ultimately did. Uh, we know she voted in favor of it. Um, but she talked about how this is déjà vu. This is what happened at the start of the four-year budget, and she's like, "I don't know how much longer I can do this." And so she was critical of the process as well and, and really talked about needing a better approach for the next four-year budget. One other thing about Explore Edmonton, Andrew Knack, the mayor, did not support this item actually. And his rationale was that he thought this should be dealt with in the, in the four-year budget instead next year, rather than in this budget.

Stephanie:
Yeah. Oh, he's a lot more of a kind of, I think, collaborative team guy or maybe more of like letting each person shine in a way. Whereas Mayor Tso, he was like, "Let me drive this boat."

Mack:
Right.

Stephanie:
(laughs) But, but I, I imagine that this might change for the four-year budget because it's gonna be so massive and it's gonna take like weeks and weeks.

Mack:
Yeah. They'll have to figure out a better or a different process just to, to handle the volume of information and discussions that are gonna take place there. So... But they did more or less get through their budget discussions on schedule for what they had outlined, which is a victory compared to last term when, you know, we noted that the meetings would go quite long and they could do with some additional agenda management. So that's a success.

Stephanie:
Yeah. That was a, and that was another thing that Andrew Knack brought up. I think it was sometime today, which is Thursday that we're recording this. There's that one point where he went, "Okay, guys, we're starting to really run out of time, so let's reduce the question time from five minutes to two minutes." And, you know, he's kind of cracking the whip in a way being like, "Okay, guys, let's, let's stay, let's stay on topic here."

Mack:
Excellent. I love to hear that. You need the chair to manage the meeting and move things along.

Stephanie:
(laughs)

Mack:
Absolutely.

Stephanie:
Yeah. I've been, I'm on a couple of boards here and there, and maybe we should, I should invite Andrew Knack to come to some of those meetings.

Mack:
(laughs)

Stephanie:
'Cause they can get long.

Mack:
Well, we know the final vote was 11 to 2. Councillors Elliott and Principe were opposed. We are getting a 6.9% tax levy increase for 2026, up a little bit more from what was originally planned. The mayor supported this, of course. He talked about the, the budget process a little bit in his closing remarks and, and said you know, even the things he didn't support in terms of amendments, he obviously supports the overall budget, and he said that overall he thinks that the changes they made have put council in a m- and the city in a much better position as we head into the next four-year budget. And he, he also had some things to say about that process. So here's the mayor talking about the next four-year budget.

Andrew Knack:
And I'll just close by echoing, which is that I am very excited about this next four-year process. I know some are skeptical going into it. I am energized by it. I think we need to be energized by it. I think we need Edmontonians to come to the table with us so that they understand how much it costs to run a city, they understand the services they're paying for, and then they can work together with us on creating the next four-year budget. I'm looking forward to doing that with administration and all of my colleagues going forward. Thank you.

Mack:
All right. Well, thank you, Stephanie, for for covering the budget and look forward to your, your updates next week as we learn a little bit more about that. We have one other thing we wanted to talk about quickly today, and that is we got an update uh, from Post Media here on the Royal Alberta Museum. So the RAM, the old RAM, not the new one, the old one, which as we know was going to be demolished. And then people, including Senator Paula Simon said, "Wait a minute, we can't afford to lose this really beautiful old historic building." And the government backtracked on, on their plans. And so in July they issued this request for development proposals, and what we now know is that six proposals were submitted, three of them met the requirements, and they are now negotiating with the top ranked pro- uh, proponent to redevelop the site.So that's a step towards saving the building. Although, we don't know. We don't really know what this proponent proposes to do, if they're going to keep the building, if they're gonna keep elements of the building. Like, we don't, we don't know any detail about that yet.

Stephanie:
So they don't even have, in the story, the, um, companies that submitted anything?

Mack:
No, we don't know who the, who the proponents are, who the negotiating students are, which isn't surprising to me because whenever these sorts of things happen they, they, they talk about it being sensitive and, um, you know, business reasons or whatever. But hopefully we'll find out more about the proponents soon enough. Um, the, you know, the, the province said if this negotiation doesn't work out with the person they, or the organization they ranked first, they could go down the list. So there's two more that met all the requirements, and so we could see something there. But, um, it does seem like they're pretty keen on moving toward redevelopment. So in the story it says, you know, it's been vacant since 2015 as we know, and we got the new Royal Alberta Museum downtown, which my kids love and use all the time. Uh, but that old building still costs $700,000 a year in maintenance, and, you know, the estimated r- redevelopment cost the last time we heard about this was $75 million in deferred maintenance and $150 million for future renovations. So we'll see what the proponent has in mind to, to save that building.

Stephanie:
Yeah. If we still had a rapid fire section, I would make a joke something like an infill developer going in and putting like 20 eightplexes on the on the lot. But we don't still have the rapid fire section, so... (laughs)

Mack:
(laughs) And they'd all be mid-blocks. Yeah.

Stephanie:
(laughs) Good one, Mack. Yeah.

Mack:
I love it.

Stephanie:
Okay, anyways.

Mack:
Well we'll follow up on The RAM as well when we... or the old RAM when we, when we hear more about that, which I expect we will soon enough. All right, that's all we got for this week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for checking out our reporting at taproot.news. Stephanie, until next week, I'm Mack.

Stephanie:
I'm Stephanie.

Mack:
And we're...

Both:
Speaking Municipally.