Calgary city councillors were reluctant to blame prior city councils or citizens’ desire for low property taxes at the expense of paying for critical infrastructure, as they heard more about the growing need for more money.

Councillors attending the Feb. 11 Infrastructure and Planning Committee (IPC) meeting heard more about a revised ~$5.7 billion in infrastructure needs that were in poor or very poor condition and could have a severe consequence if they fail.  

It’s part of an $18 billion poor- to very-poor condition infrastructure gap identified by City of Calgary officials.

“What we’re trying to do is identify that, as I mentioned, severe consequence of failure assets. Not only assets that have a risk of public safety or security, but have a massive impact to an entire citywide, the entire service from a service disruption perspective,” said Steve Wyton, manager of asset management with the City of Calgary.

“So, we recognize, based on the criteria that we use, a severe consequence of failure asset, if it ruptures, or if it fails, would have impact to over 500,000 people, approximately.”

According to the city admin presentation, though 11 per cent of Calgary’s $183 billion in assets are in poor or very poor condition, not all are critical assets.

Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal said he appreciated the effort to reinvigorate Calgary’s asset and risk management strategies, but noted that individual infrastructure risks were still spread across 18 different business units.

“Why don’t we have an enterprise-wide risk management and technical services consolidated at a high level, so all these risk registers and asset management plans are rolled up to one organization to make those decisions and not dispersed across the enterprise,” he said.

Wyton said that work was underway.

Calgary increased its infrastructure spending to $3.8 billion for 2026. Recently, Infrastructure Services GM Michael Thompson said that $5 billion in annual spending is needed to stay on top of city infrastructure needs. Thompson has also said that Calgary is improving at fully spending the allocated capital funding in Calgary’s budgets.

Infrastructure investment hasn’t necessarily matched growth

The result of years of inadequate spending to maintain Calgary’s aging infrastructure was highlighted in the recent Bearspaw South feeder main Independent Review Panel report.

“Across Canada, capital investment in utilities has stagnated, resulting in widespread infrastructure deterioration,” the report read.

“Rapid population growth across the country has further strained municipal utilities, forcing them to balance competing capital priorities. In such environments, asset integrity programs often struggle to secure consistent funding amid more immediate service demands.”

In particular, the report showed a graph indicating that the water services utility rarely spent its capital budget over the past 20 years. Worth noting is that, unlike other City of Calgary infrastructure, water utilities infrastructure is paid for through water rates, not property tax dollars.

“Only twice over this twenty-year period did the Water Utility spend its budgeted capital, chronically underinvesting and deferring important projects that could have increased the resilience of the system to outages,” the Bearspaw report read.

It’s a similar pattern that’s revealed itself in Calgary’s roads, only last year receiving an ongoing cash injection due to former Coun. Peter Demong’s effort to rehabilitate Calgary’s pavement quality.  When the issue was first brought forward, city officials said there was a $550 million backlog in road work that needed completion.

Meanwhile, annually, at November budget deliberations, there’s constant tension over property tax or water rate increases to Calgarians.

Going back to 2005, Calgary has consistently increased property taxes greater than the typical consumer price index growth, according to City and Statistics Canada data. Though in many years, like in 2006, if population growth percentage was included in the calculation, property tax revenue fell behind the inflation-plus-population calculation (by almost four per cent).

From 2005 to 2010, the average Calgary property tax increase was around 4.5 per cent, and the inflation increase roughly 2.5 per cent annually. In that same time, Calgary’s population grew by around 15 per cent.

The Bearspaw panel report estimated Calgary’s population has grown by 70 per cent since 2000, with it being 15 per cent between 2020 and 2024 alone.

 The race to the property tax bottom

In the City of Calgary’s fall 2025 satisfaction survey, Calgarians were split on property tax increases to preserve or improve services (or reduce and cut).  Further, only 42 per cent say they receive good value for their tax dollars.

During the 2025 budget adjustment, newly elected councillors drove the proposed property tax rate down by roughly two per cent (from 3.6 to 1.6 per cent), largely through the use of reserves (mostly property tax funded).

It was an election promise many of the elected councillors made, as have many councillors in past municipal elections.

When asked about city council’s perennial drive to lower property tax rates, Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas said after the December 30, 2025, Bearspaw break, the narrative around infrastructure spending changed. He said that he believes Calgarians are now willing and able to support city council in doing things differently, including dealing with the infrastructure deficit, “and acknowledging that we pay one way or another.”

“Either we pay modestly now, or we pay massively down the road,” he said.

“We are ultimately accountable, and we are tasked with fixing this issue, not just when it comes to our water infrastructure, but everything else that Calgarians rely on for safe, affordable quality of life in the city – rec centers, bridges, transportation infrastructure, electrical utilities, all of these things have to come together and have to be maintained in order for us to be able to continue to ensure our safety and our quality of life, but also our affordability.”

Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean, long a proponent of low-to-no property tax increases, said that previous councils have lacked focus on providing basic services.

“I think the reason why we’re in a situation where they’re talking about taxes or infrastructure, the previous councils, let’s be honest, they spend a lot of money on the big, bright, shiny things all the have the things they wanted, the new arena, the Glenbow Museum, the Art Commons (Transformation),” McLean, who voted in favour of most of these projects, said.

“We went and spent a lot of money on a lot of things that are wants, maybe not necessarily needs. Now we’re going to focus on needs and not maybe pursue those big, shiny projects. Let’s put the money into infrastructure. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to have a huge tax increase.”

Ward 4 Coun. DJ Kelly said that the buck has been passed for 20-plus years, and it’s going to take prioritization of critical infrastructure needs to ensure infrastructure improves with minimal impact to Calgary taxpayers.

“We’re going to be the ones who are going to address that,” he said.

“It will take an awful lot of focus, but right now we need to sit down to be able to figure out how to do that, to make sure that we don’t have any form of property tax rate shock, any of those kinds of things. There’s not really an appetite from council to do that.”