Calgary city councillors have mixed views on how a document leak from earlier this month will impact an upcoming strategy meeting on Calgary’s next four-year budget.

On Sept. 29, Calgary city councillors will have their first strategic meeting of council since the unauthorized release of budget information that showed that council had asked for a budget scenario of property tax revenue increases of 15 per cent, 12.5 per cent, nine per cent and six per cent over the four-year term.

In the aftermath, several councillors have said that those numbers were not a realistic look at the budget, with Mayor Jeromy Farkas even saying that it represented more of a wish list of items from a variety of City of Calgary business units and other partners.

Now, in what’s likely to be the final strategic meeting of council before budget documents are released to the public in early November, councillors will have to determine how they want this chapter of the four-year cycle to play out.

Ward 9 Coun. Harrison Clark said that he believes the leak puts a certain amount of pressure and perhaps a bit of fear in city councillors, stunting a potentially productive conversation on Calgary’s needs. He said there are legacy deficits, including Calgary’s reported $50 billion infrastructure funding gap over the next 10 years.

“The only implication that I’d be really worried about here is that we avoid doing that work because of fear of the repercussions,” he said.

“There was never ever any intent to deliver a 20 per cent property tax increase. That work was preliminary and months ago, and we are now working to tailor that down and discern what it is we can actually do to help clear some of this off our books.”

A question of confidentiality

Ward 11 Coun. Rob Ward said that if nothing else, the budget leak shone light on a conversation about how much of Calgary’s budget information needs to be provided in-camera or tagged ‘confidential.’

He said that having the documents noted as confidential means that even ward office staff aren’t privy to the information. That’s hamstrung his team’s ability to prepare for the budget deliberations ahead.

“I think it’s going to open up the conversation about what should be confidential and what shouldn’t. In my opinion, I think it should be open because if it’s not, my staff can’t do any work on it,” Ward said.

“Having my staff scramble eight days before we have to start budget deliberations, I don’t think is right. I would like to see stuff be open so that my staff can actually do their jobs.”

Ward said he thinks, by now, Calgarians have at least a basic understanding of the city’s infrastructure deficit. Now it’s a question of how they deal with that.

“I think I don’t see any harm in having that discussion in public because then it opens the door to have public input be a part of that discussion,” he said.

Ward said he, like many other councillors, will be hosting public town halls on the upcoming city budget to gather people’s perspectives.

“I want to understand what’s important to residents and what isn’t important to residents, and what they think is a fair tax increase; we need to get some sort of public perception on this,” Coun. Ward said.

“I think for us to just make all the decisions on our own, while we are elected to be leaders, public input should never be ignored, and it should be included as much as possible.”

Ward 8 Coun. Nathan Schmidt said that he thinks the leak was a distraction.

“The way I see this is that as a council, we have a lot of tough decisions to make coming up that’s not easy, and I think that the leak served as a distraction,” he said.

“It, perhaps, in some ways served as a way to distract from some people taking responsibility for those tough decisions by making this conversation about transparency, and that is not how we should be doing our job.”

Public session, or behind closed doors

All three councillors believed that more of Tuesday’s conversation will likely be done in the open. Schmidt, however, said that not all of it should be. He said that when talking about personnel, unions, and other different functions of certain units, it should be confidential.

“There’s no other entity in the world that I can think of that has these discussions out in public because some of this stuff needs to be carefully protected until the time when it’s ready to go,” he said.

“There’s risk involved with that, and we have to manage this city effectively as the governors of the city, and it won’t be managed as effectively if we can’t do our jobs, and this prevents us from doing our jobs.”

Coun. Clark said that he believes much of the conversation will happen in public, but inevitably people have to understand that some of the discussion has to happen behind closed doors.

“It doesn’t mean that we want to keep it a secret,” he said.

“It just means that we want to position ourselves to be able to deliver the best possible outcomes for Calgarians, and sometimes that means keeping that information in that room.”

With more of it in the open, however, Clark thinks some councillors will hold their views private.

“That was always my frustration with the leak. People will withhold their perspectives, their intentions,” he said.

“They will withhold, and they will withhold like their sense of responsibility. There is work to do, and it’s not easy. You did not come here for the easy ride.”

Schmidt said there won’t be any fear for him. He recognized that the large property tax figure wasn’t connected to any meaningful information, and that it was preliminary.

“The number that speaks to me the loudest is, you look back to 2014, service satisfaction levels were hovering above 80 per cent and now, at times, they’ve dropped below 60 per cent,” he said.

“That number speaks to me because we’ve seen that when Calgarians rank what they want to see from us, low taxation is not at the top of the list; they want to see us get them results for what they see as issues in their city.”