Calgary budget town hall digs into Ward 1 citizen priorities
[Excerpt] By Darren Krause
Calgary budget discussion time approaches and councillors are gathering input from citizens on their priorities.
Coun. Sonya Sharp hosted dozens of Ward 1 residents Wednesday evening to get their take on priorities for mid-cycle Calgary budget deliberations coming up in November.
Sharp and her ward team posted nine different categories on the walls of the Vienna Room at the Varsity Community Association, and guests, who signed up to the town-hall-style event in advance, put a green (invest) or red (cut) dot on their areas of interest.
Like her colleagues, Coun. Sharp is tapping into the collective consciousness to find out what citizen priorities are at this point in time. It’s an exercise she’s done in the past to dig into what’s important for ward residents.
“This budget is about the citizens. I will formulate my motions based on what I’m hearing. It’s not that I’m going to show up at budget and say, ‘OK, I think you can cut all of this in order to save money,’” Sharp said.
“What I fundamentally want to find out from the people that show up, the people I’ve talked to before and after, is surgically, what do you want us to look at? It’s really about them guiding this budget as it’s the mid-cycle.”
There’s only so much money to go around, property tax increase or not, but Coun. Sharp said she believes that citizens understand there’s always a trade-off with the investments they want. She said they saw the recent report on the cost to improve maintenance on city roads – and somewhere there’s going to be an impact elsewhere, perhaps in a place like snow clearing.
“Those things go hand in hand, because our weather is so hard on our roads, so it’s kind of like a catch-22. If we don’t snow clear and do that properly, then our infrastructure on our roads are going to feel that burden,” she said.
“So, there’s so much to think about when it comes to these budgets.”
Even since she was first elected to council in 2021, Coun. Sharp said that citizen priorities have changed. At first it was more about little things, low taxes and what Calgarians are getting for their money. It’s evolved to interest rates and affordability, inflation, population growth increasing its burden on citizens and now the City of Calgary is becoming a part of that, she said.
“Over the last couple years, I’ve really heard from Calgarians about the things we don’t need, that some of the projects that aren’t infrastructure projects, some of the vanity stuff that could have been paused,” Sharp said.
“It’s really shifted. There’s also a very strong tone of discontent from Calgarians.”
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