With the municipal election looming, we are approaching what some refer to as the silly season around City Hall. Witness the recent and very public airing of differences of opinion between Mayor Naheed Nenshi and the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association over growth management.
While the media looks to attract eyeballs for advertisers using the tried-and-true he-said-she-said variety of political coverage, the mundane but vitally important job of building our city continues. A good example is the Framework for Growth and Change: Financing and Funding Strategy, which was presented to council’s planning and urban development committee on April 10.
Why should you care about such an arcane-sounding piece of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo? For starters, over the coming decades, if growth and change are not prudently managed, it could cost you and your family tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary property taxes, hundreds of additional hours in traffic, and badly deteriorating services.
Some hard facts - between 1992 and 2008, Calgary experienced a $3.8-billion shortfall in provincial grants in comparison to the growth of the provincial economy. In the current political climate that trend is not likely to change any time soon. The city’s Long Range Financial Plan forecasts an operating deficit of $300 million annually by 2021 and an accumulated capital deficit of $7 billion by that same year.
Compounding the problem, Calgary has historically given sweetheart deals to suburban developers, when compared to most other large Canadian cities. Municipal watchdog Civic Camp’s governance finance and infrastructure group has calculated that even after the 2011 increase in development levies, subsidies to new suburban communities between 2011 and 2015 will total $400 million. These kinds of numbers signal nothing short of a financial crisis.
The basic problem: every new suburban street, neighbourhood and community puts us further and further in debt. Bigger, it turns out, is not better, just more expensive. Suburban sprawl spilling out over the prairie means more kilometres of expensive water pipe, sewer pipe, stormwater pipe and roads — increasing both the capital costs to put them there in the first place, the operation and maintenance costs to keep them working properly and the expensive proposition of replacing them when they wear out.
Property taxes for low-density development don’t come anywhere close to paying for the costs incurred. In the case of water and sanitary infrastructure, only 50 per cent of the cost is recovered through levies. The reason Calgary’s director of planning, Rollin Stanley, has gotten into hot water with some aldermen is because he’s voiced these inconvenient truths.
Click here to view the full article by Professor Noel Keough in FFWD Magazine.