This past year in Calgary has been a year of questionable decision-making, including approving and then rescinding a single-use bylaw and slapping democracy in the face by approving blanket zoning when 75% of Calgarians at a public hearing, voted against the bylaw. But Mayor Jyoti Gondek, in her State of the City address before a crowd at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon, said “we are not a city in chaos.” Gondek was there to support the approval last week of an across-the-board tax increase of 3.6% in 2025, saying council held the line it promised to keep two years ago. Of course, promising to 'hold the line' gave council a free rein to approve the tax increase. Gondek also diverted attention from the increase, saying the federal and Alberta governments offload costs onto the city while collecting an “epic amount” of income tax from Calgarians. But no mention of cost savings in the budget or in the year ahead when she and the rest of council will be up for re-reelection. In a press conference after the luncheon, Gondek was asked about city administration, the bureaucracy which puts together the city’s budgets, and whether or not it actually runs the city, not council. “I think it’s important to remember that council acts as a board of governors and our job is to be strategic and our job is to bring good oversight." "The job of administration is to deliver on the direction that we have given them. In September when the administration came back and said the budget increase had to be four or five percent, I was incredibly vocal saying that is not the direction you were given, that’s not council’s direction, so go back and figure out how to deal with this within council’s direction.” The job of a board of governors, or board of directors, is to closely monitor budgets and how much money is coming in, versus going out. Its job is to take care of stakeholders and clients, which in this case is one and the same: Calgary taxpayers. But this particular board of governors, that calls the Calgary Municipal Building home, continually increases taxes every two years without publicly doing a forensic investigation into costs and where they can be trimmed. The City of Calgary is the largest corporation and largest bureaucracy in the city, with billion-dollar budgets and close to 14,000 employees, with an average annual salary in the range of $65,000. Not that we would ever want anyone to lose their jobs, but such an investigation should start with the bureaucracy, looking to see where the redundancies are in duties, any overlap of jobs, that 100% efficiencies (or as close as is reasonable) are achieved every day. An area to deeply explore is ideologies — ideas that are implemented because other municipalities or levels of government are doing it. The idea Calgarians have coughed up billions of dollars for, as the major called it, “the former Green Line” after her Chamber of Commerce lunch, is ludicrous and more of a legacy former Mayor Nenshi left for himself than it was a viable transportation system. A legacy rooted in ideology and wokeism, and look where that took Bud Light. It became a vanity project to many at city hall, who pushed for it until it got pushed off the tracks. And that's just one example.Rather than just giving administration, which no doubt has many workers who embrace woke ideologies, orders every two years to formulate a budget, council must give it a deep dive to ensure a high level of efficiency. The city’s clients and stakeholders deserve it.
