Council pushes final decision on Regina budget to Monday

The budget deliberations Friday at Regina City Hall could have sent viewers into a spin with all the back and forth.

Council had multiple votes on whether to try to finish with the budget Friday or go into a fourth day. It ended up being extended into Monday for the operating, capital and utilities budgets.

First, council narrowly voted to refer the entire operating and capital budget back to administration to clarify things a bit and then bring the budget report back to council to discuss again at the end of January.

After the subsequent lunch break, there were questions to administration about the capital projects, and administration explained that it wouldn’t be able to award any construction tenders until after the budget was approved. That could be too late to get all the projects dealt with, or it would increase costs.

After that, council voted to open the issue again and cancel the referral.

There was then a lot of talk about capital road projects and another motion was put up, this one to refer the capital and operating budgets back to administration but to approve about $50 million of capital projects to go ahead. That vote lost 6-5.

A few hours later, council voted to push approval of the budget back. This time, it approved the tabling of the capital and operating budget to Monday at noon, with Coun. Jason Mancinelli saying there are still some parts of the budget he’s not sure about and he wanted to sit down and consider them a while longer.

Mancinelli moved all three motions. He was frustrated with the way the budget was presented, with little information about past spending or decisions on some projects, and said he just wanted to have some good options to be able to debate properly with council.

He called it taking care to the details.

“I just want to do the best job I can and trying to format this way was very difficult. I hope I’m better organized on Monday to better accomplish it and that’s why I was moving that way,” said Mancinelli.

The councillor said he wasn’t frustrated the process was taking so long; it was more that he was stressed because city budget is very important.

“It’s going to take as long as it takes to get the best budget I can find for the people who’ve given me the privilege to represent them. It’s the work and I’ll do the work,” he said.

“On the floor of council, trying to whip together three numbers and trying to find the lineage of it to prove it out, it’s politically entertaining but it’s not positive city-building in my eyes.”

In his original motion, Mancinelli had wanted more than a month’s time to get more information and parse things out but, in the end, only got three days.

“It’s the time I’m allotted, it’s the time I’ll take and I’ll do my best,” said Mancinelli.

Council then began discussing the utilities budget, but got hung up there as well. There was a motion to reduce the base rate increase but it was decided to push that to Monday as well to give time for more information on the implications to come from city administration.

Money changes

There were a handful of changes or decisions made around the budget on Friday.

The only one with an implication to people’s property taxes was a motion from Coun. Cheryl Stadnichuk, which was a 0.03 per cent mill rate increase to get $100,000 to support work related to the city’s cold weather strategy. Administration said that increase is worth about $0.06 per month to the average home’s taxes, and the motion passed unanimously.

Mayor Sandra Masters forwarded a motion to change how administration presents its budgets – changing to accrual accounting (which is how federal and provincial governments do it), to put a deadline up for presentation of budgets, and to include a one-page simplified list of rate increases.

Coun. Bob Hawkins supported the motion, repeating what he’s said previously in these budget deliberations, that this year’s budget has been very difficult to understand. He blamed part of it on multi-year budgets.

“Multi-year budgets work if there aren’t many changes from one year to the next in the fundamental basics,” he said. “Over the last three or four years, we’ve had nothing but radical changes year to year — COVID, inflation, interest rates. It has meant that the multi-year budget hasn’t worked very well; in fact, it has created confusion.”

Administration said the first bit could take a lot of resources to achieve, so the motion was referred to administration to find out how much time it would take and money it would cost. That’s to come back to city council in the first three months of 2024.

Masters had a second motion to spread some money around; half was approved and half was pushed back.

For the YWCA’s new building project, $1.014 million was approved, while $1 million to help fund the ballooning cost for the Globe Theatre’s renovations was put on pause to wait and hear from the Globe Theatre.

To pay for the YWCA money, Economic Development Regina won’t get the extra $300,000 it had asked for, and $700,000 is being taken away from the Regina Exhibition Association Limited’s operating budget ask, bringing that down to $2.2 million.

Several councillors worried about the impact on the REAL budget, with Dan LeBlanc saying he supported the motion, but would also expect support if REAL has to come back halfway through 2024 and ask for more money.

Council also approved in principle the mill rate requests and/or funding requests for a series of community organizations: The Provincial Capital Commission, Community and Social Impact Regina, Regina Downtown Business Improvement District, and Regina Warehouse Business Improvement District.

Also included were $1,695,000 for Economic Development Regina’s operating budget, $2,200,000 for REAL’s operating budget, and “a one-time increase to the community non-profit tax exemption policy financial cap to $1,520,662, an increase of $191,447 and have the cap increase every year at a rate equivalent of the previous year’s mill rate increased.”

At the end of Friday, the proposed mill rate increase sat at 2.85 per cent – the final number won’t be known until the budget is finalized, potentially on Monday.