Calgary’s budget funding guidance delivered Tuesday would call for a more than $50 per month increase in each of the next four years for a typical Calgary homeowner.

The numbers, initially leaked from closed-session meetings but put forward publicly at Tuesday’s Strategic Meeting of Council, confirm a potential compounding property tax increase of roughly 42.5 per cent between 2027 and 2030.

City administration and councillors, however, made clear that this was not a finalized budget, and not even a public draft of the budget, which will come Nov. 10.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about a specific property tax number, and I want to be clear: that number is not a proposed budget. It’s not an administrative recommendation, and is not a council decision,” said City of Calgary Chief Administrative Officer David Duckworth.

“It was simply the result of an early look at potential investments that are needed to sustain the services that Calgarians rely on, while responding to the pressures of a rapidly growing city.”

The purpose of Tuesday’s discussion, Duckworth said, was to determine the outcomes sought and the trade-offs and risks that were associated with the July 28 funding guidance of 15 per cent (2027), 12.5 per cent, nine per cent, and six per cent property tax revenue increases.

“Ultimately, a budget is not about a tax rate; it’s about outcomes. It’s about the kind of city Calgarians want to live, raise, start businesses, and retire in. It’s about what services residents and visitors rely on every single day, such as safe roads, a transit system that gets them to work, school, and important appointments,” he said.

“It’s about firefighters and police officers arriving when a citizen calls 911. It’s about delivering potable water… that comes out of citizens’ taps. Waste and recycling collected on schedule. Those are the things that happen because city employees deliver them every single day, and because council makes decisions to invest in them.”

Duckworth was careful to reiterate that Calgary still has one of the lowest property tax rates and among the lowest per capita operating costs among large Canadian cities.

Painting the outcome picture

Duckworth and Chief Financial Officer Les Tochor both outlined the positive movement on dealing with Calgary’s infrastructure backlog and growing the City’s operational capacity.

They contrasted that with an overly bleak depiction of what would happen if they stuck with property tax increases of 4.2, 4.4, 5, and 4.2 per cent over the next four years. In a slide they presented, it showed that those property tax levels would result in deferred pressures into the future, and less than that would be a visible decline in service levels.

“Each budget choice has a service consequence, a financial consequence, and ultimately a community consequence,” Duckworth said.

“Our responsibility is to make every single dollar count, to provide council with clear options and professional advice, and to be honest about what those dollars can and cannot deliver.”

The City of Calgary’s single largest budget line could get considerably larger, with the Calgary police looking for a 19 per cent operational increase over the next four years. That’s on top of an $80 million capital budget increase between 2027 and 2030 (from $110.58 in 2023 to 2026, to $191.90 million in 2027 to 2030).

Calgary city councillors were meeting with Calgary police brass behind closed doors Tuesday afternoon.

Outside council chambers, Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said that in advance of actual budget discussions when the November documents are presented, this gives councillors a chance to find out what Calgarians want.

“I think where we’re at in our stage and our discussions and deliberations on a budget, it goes down to a vision of what we want for Calgary, and I think now is the right time that we have that debate and discussion with Calgarians,” he said.

Pantazopoulos said the 15 per cent increase for 2027 isn’t a starting point. He said there is no starting point, and that they’ll gather information from city admin and Calgarians to determine what kind of outcomes are sought, and then how they can pay for it.

“The numbers that fall out will be based on what we can afford, what actually happens to our infrastructure, and what Calgarians want in their vision for the city over the next four years. And ultimately, that’s the decision that I’m going to make when I vote,” he said.

Mayor Jeromy Farkas said that this number represents absolutely every ask that’s imaginable, and they’ll take to it like they did the last budget when they whittled a six per cent increase down to 1.2 per cent.

Farkas said he’s committed to keeping the overall property tax increase between the city and the province at less than $400 for the year. He said his focus was on public safety and infrastructure.

“Now that we know what we know about the state of our infrastructure, the fact that we have rec centers with roofs that are about to collapse, the fact that we have an unreliable water utility locally, we can’t ignore those things,” he said.

“So, for me as mayor and the council that we’re leading, we want to be known as that essential infrastructure council. We are going to refuse to pass the buck to future generations.”

Councillors were still behind closed doors at the time of this story’s publication. More discussion on priorities and outcomes is expected to happen in the coming days.