Calgary city councillors shot down one of their colleagues’ attempts to get a line-by-line breakdown of city spending, with some saying the onerous task is already largely done.

Ward 14 Coun. Landon Johnston asked city councillors to consider an urgent Notice of Motion that asked for “transaction-level general ledger actuals in PDF format for all City departments and business units” that covered the full year 2025 and January to September 2026.

The motion also asked for the creation of an annual process to provide the updated actuals to council members and their staff, with a budget of $150,000.  Johnston’s motion asked for an initial $100,000 from the Fiscal Stability Reserve to cover the work for this year.

“Over the past 11 months, I’ve had a couple of departments’ line-by-line actuals sent to my office, and it has been a very useful tool to see how dollars are being spent,” Johnston said.

“It’s not about micromanaging; it’s about patterns, and it’s about finding where priorities are being spent going forward.”

Johnston said he wanted the analysis to go right down to the dollar, giving councillors line of sight into where budget efficiencies could be found.

“Back in November of last year, we tried to cut two per cent across three departments. Well, we were told ‘no, that’s impossible,’” Johnston said.

“Well, guess what? When I looked at the line-by-line actuals, I found more than two per cent that we could have cut back then, based on what our priorities are.”

City of Calgary Chief Financial Officer Les Tochor said that the work would require the hiring of 10 external employees to handle the redaction process on the documents.  He said the reports would take about 75 to 80 hours to run.

Internal time would also be spent reviewing the documents before sending them to council.

“To the point, it is approximately going to be about 14 million rows. The reports will be quite large in terms of there are 39 columns across, and so the size is not that really a person could review it,” he said.  

Questions on the urgency

Coun. Johnston said he’d been having the conversation with city finance officials for the past 11 months. It was also disclosed that the last communication with admin was yesterday afternoon. The motion had been sent to the city clerk.

The motion was posted to social media late Monday night. City councillors, however, said it wasn’t delivered to them.

“Something urgent and important, I mean, mistakes happen, but clearly it was on somebody’s desk last night, enough to post on social media and not to forward to us,” he said.

“In order to make this type of decision for this amount of work and not being able to review this ahead of time, that just makes it very difficult for me to support this in an urgent matter, given that members of the public knew more about this coming into today than we did.”

Section 69 of Calgary’s procedure bylaw outlines rules for an urgent notice of motion. It states these must be kept to a minimum, and if it is to come forward, it has to go to the chair of the meeting (mayor) and the city clerk. The chair can provide recommendations to council on whether it’s urgent.

Outside of the debate on urgency, other councillors said this just wasn’t needed.

Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said that while they don’t get 14 million lines of coded accounts, they do get a deep level of granularity from each city business unit.

“My team personally spends hundreds of hours going through this. It has a breakdown of costs. This is all public. It has salaries, materials, everything year-over-year,” he said.

“In addition, we’ve been provided almost 1,000 pages of individual for every amendment from the capital, from the operating, that has more importantly, the source of uses, the intent, the dollar value.”

Johnston, however, said that when the city is staring down a double-digit property tax increase over multiple years, this was another tool in the bag to find cost savings.

“If you don’t see how important that is going into a budget with a double-digit increase, I don’t know what else to tell you. This is an opportunity for us to get into the granulars,” he said.

The motion was defeated 6-9, with Couns. Landon Johnston, Rob Ward, Kim Tyers, Jennifer Wyness, Dan McLean and Mike Jamieson voting in favour.