Modernizing the MGA posted June 1st, 2016 in 2013-2017 Term, A city with better housing & transportation choices, A fiscally responsible city, A profitable and prosperous city, Affordable Housing, Capital Region, Smarter Planning, Taxation, Transit, Urban Sprawl

Most people don’t realize that the actions of any municipality – whether it’s Edmonton or Evansburg – are governed by a piece of provincial legislation called the Municipal Government Act (aka the MGA). As far as documents go, they don’t come much thicker than the MGA – mainly because of the incredible complexity that comes with legislating the existence and function of Alberta’s 344 municipalities, including how we pay for roads, where school sites are assembled, and how we develop our communities. The Act has a grand total of 710 sections.

The MGA has not been overhauled since 1995 and in that time municipalities (and society) have evolved significantly. Yesterday, the Government of Alberta tabled important changes to the Act that are intended to modernize it for the 21st Century.

While I haven’t reviewed all the proposed amendments in detail, there are important sections that Edmonton has been paying particular attention to.

For starters, the amendments recognize the imperative for regional collaboration on issues of shared importance and will expand the mandate of the Capital Region Board to to address not only planning for responsible growth, but also regional service delivery and cost sharing. If you watched my State of the City address, you’ll know that this is something I have been pressing hard for and I’m pleased that the Province heard our concerns. These amendments will enable us to build a more equitable, competitive, prosperous Edmonton Metro region – which is in all the region’s interest.

There are other important aspects to this legislation that will have an impact on Edmonton, including the ability to ‘split’ the non-residential tax base into different classes, which we hope will allow us to send price signals that encourage the redevelopment of complicated sites like surface parking lots and contaminated sites (as an example) and prevent buildings from being prematurely demolished.

The proposed amendments also give municipalities the ability to charge land developers new levies (i.e. a fee) to help build community recreation facilities, fire halls, police stations and libraries. This could be an important tool for how we might start to close the $1.4 billion shortfall on new growth, but we are only at the start of a conversation with industry about which tools are most appropriate to close the fiscal gap on new residential growth. Having this legislation tabled will certainly help focus that discussion.

Lastly, amendments also allow for the creation of inclusionary zoning in new communities – essentially enabling us to mandate that new communities contain a proportion of affordable housing. There will undoubtedly be some benefit to the municipalities who choose to use this tool, but I’ve always viewed this as a last resort. While I am a firm believer that communities across Edmonton should share the responsibility for housing those in need, I am concerned about the equity of the cost of new affordable housing being downloaded upon new homebuyers. I also believe that allocating more land doesn’t actually solve the problem alone; instead, predictable and sustainable funding to help build or renovate housing projects will. Both our City Charter discussions and the upcoming review of the provincial Housing Act offer opportunities to address the shortfall in the public funding we currently face, and recent commitments by both the federal and provincial governments to building new affordable housing are also part of the solution.

Overall, the amendments proposed yesterday are a good start in resetting the roles and responsibilities for cities like Edmonton, and giving us the authority to make our own decisions on issues of local importance. We’re certainly ready to handle it.    

 

 

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Edmonton’s Welcome of Evacuees – More than just Numbers posted May 6th, 2016 in 2013-2017 Term, A beautiful city, News

The best way you can help remains donating to the Red Cross online or by texting “Redcross” to 30333 for a quick and easy $5 donation. All of these funds will be matched by both the federal and provincial governments.

Words cannot even begin to express the range of emotions we have all felt over these past few days. Early on, it was with horror at the images coming back via social media of cars trapped on highways while flames leapt over the road. Then, as the hours went by, the evacuees began to trickle into the City of Edmonton’s reception centre and the stories of escape and survival were made real for all of us. The scale of this disaster is nearly unfathomable. The number of people evacuated would fill the seats in five NHL hockey arenas.

When I visited the reception centre on Wednesday and Thursday, I met some of the people who made it out – and as a father, husband and neighbour, you can’t help but hear their stories in different ways. I saw a little girl who was having a meltdown over a juice box she didn’t want to drink. On any other day (and often in my kitchen) this would be a fairly routine event, but those tears felt different. It took everything I had not to give her a hug and do whatever I could to make things normal again. There’s a story behind every person in that reception centre, each family stuck on the highway, and each evacuee sleeping on a friend’s couch.

It’s always been Edmonton’s instinct to help, and help we have.

Seeing the City’s coordinated efforts between our Fire Rescue Services, our Emergency Support Response Team, Red Cross, Northlands, Edmonton Police, Edmonton Transit Service, Edmonton International Airport, Alberta Health Services, Humane Society, counselling services, recreational services, daycare services, insurance companies and so many more has brought me incredible amounts of pride. On top of all of this, my office has been inundated with calls from big corporations, small mom-and-pop shops and individuals who want to do something – anything – to help.

From EEDC’s fundraising breakfast in Churchill Square, to businesses offering meeting rooms, to corporate donations, hotel discounts, mobile pharmacies, complimentary cell phones and storage facilities – there isn’t much Edmontonians haven’t offered to share. You have stepped up in a big, big way.

This help is just the beginning, I’m afraid. Over the next days and months our Wood Buffalo neighbours will need our ongoing support, because the recovery will be like nothing we’ve ever done before.

We are all coming together and it makes us a stronger city because of it. If I had one message for all the evacuees it would be that they can always count on Edmonton to be there – today, tomorrow and beyond. Even if we are just one small part of the story of their life, we hope the story is that Edmonton is loving, kind and never runs out of hugs.

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Provincial budget reaction posted April 15th, 2016 in 2013-2017 Term, A city with better housing & transportation choices, A profitable and prosperous city, Affordable Housing, An environmentally responsible city, Arts & Culture, Crime

Edmonton_legYesterday, the Provincial government released its 2016 budget and there is still much analysis to be done on what it all means for Edmonton. I certainly understand the pressure this government is under to deliver a budget amidst a deep economic crisis that has left a huge hole in provincial revenue. So, with tempered expectations, here are some of my initial reactions.

First, the sharp increase in funding for affordable housing is long overdue and will have long-term, positive impacts on the quality of life for many vulnerable Edmontonians. As a Council, this is something we have been advocating for many months – including taking a hard line during our budget deliberations in December – and it’s good to see our concerns have been heard. A stable affordable housing supply is a powerful enabler and a key part of our poverty reduction efforts, but it also helps people to enter and stay in the workforce, while reducing health and justice costs.

I am also very pleased to see the investment made in the Fort Edmonton Park Indigenous Peoples’ Experience. The City had committed over $70 million to infrastructure upgrades to the park, but this provincial funding (which will hopefully be matched federally) will help tell the story of our first peoples in a more authentic, enriching way. This project is a testament to the power of partnership with the Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations and the Metis Nation of Alberta and we are grateful for their advocacy work.

While we weren’t expecting any new significant transit investments for Edmonton, $2.2 billion in revenue generated from carbon pricing has been earmarked for ‘green infrastructure like public transit.’ This is a ‘wait and see’ sort of announcement, and there is more work to be done to dedicate appropriate amounts of funding to transit, but we are trending in the right direction and we look forward to discussing these program details with the government in the coming months.

Along with announcements for hospital planning, schools and post-secondary education funding, there was a myriad of other economic development and investment credit programs (including $500 million for petrochemical diversification) that will surely benefit Edmonton in the coming years.

This budget did result in some decreases to our Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) funding, a key part of how we build infrastructure in Edmonton. This downturn has resulted in better pricing for some of our renewal projects (i.e. paving etc), so we may be able to make up some of the difference, but Edmonton’s infrastructure deficit remains significant.

Budget 2016 reminds us that the current roller coaster approach the Province takes to funding isn’t effective and makes long-term planning difficult for us. This puts even greater emphasis on our City Charter discussions and the need for more sustainable, predictable sources of funding for infrastructure and a longer-term view to how we solve complex issues. Our conversations have been positive so far, but in the next 18 months we need to see significant action to match good intention.

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Rolling out a better transit system posted April 13th, 2016 in 2013-2017 Term, A city with better housing & transportation choices, A fiscally responsible city, Smarter Planning, Transit

Imagine it’s -10º and you’re standing at a bus shelter, travel mug in hand, waiting patiently for a bus to take you to work. You’re not a regular transit user, but you’re curious whether you can reduce your car expenses, relieve roadway congestion and make a dent in your carbon footprint. Within a few minutes the bus approaches – only to whizz right by your stop because there are too many people on board. You shuffle home, not sure you’ll try transit ever again.

This scenario isn’t uncommon during any given rush hour. That’s why later this week our Transportation Committee will be discussing a report that proposes reallocating resources (50,000 services hours, in fact) from under-utilized routes to high demand routes, thereby improving the service for more people. This change is at the crux of the the ‘coverage vs. frequency’ discussion that is being evaluated during the development of the City’s transit strategy. The concept is wonderfully explained in this short video and it’s a topic I’ve been discussing for a long time.

This week’s report highlights a couple of interesting facts. The routes where ridership is low – in some cases averaging 8 riders per hour – cost the City an average of $9.50 per trip to operate. That’s a $6 loss for the City on each and every trip. Conversely, the average cost per trip across the entire system is $1.30. Broadly speaking, if we are looking at more efficient ways at delivering City services, our transit system is a great place to start. Secondly, the report reminds us that a February audit of ETS reliability showed a decline in the on-time performance of the system and it is falling below the threshold set out in the City’s policy. Reallocation of resources to high demand routes will increase the system’s overall reliability and get us closer to our target of 90% of trips departing within 3 minutes of their scheduled time.

These changes will understandably impact some Edmontonians (City staff estimate 900 weekday passengers) and will leave some communities with little or no direct transit option. I certainly empathize with these people and understand that it will mean a shift in habits for some people. However, some of these routes would need to increase ridership by 100 per cent in order to meet minimum service standards, as established by city policy. Reallocation means tens of thousands of more people will get a more reliable, more frequent transit service that wins customers over rather than pushes them away. In December, ETS began implementing some schedule enhancements like the kind that are being proposed and the results show the level of service has improved significantly.

Every day, Edmontonians step onto a bus or train 400,000 times and every year ETS provides about two million hours of service. Even if you don’t take transit yourself, you likely rely on someone who does. Which means having a high performing transit service supports business and economic development, along with the city’s environmental and social goals.

You can help with the development of our Transit Strategy by helping us refine the tradeoffs before us. FIll out the new survey here.

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Calculating the real costs of our growth posted March 18th, 2016 in 2013-2017 Term, A fiscally responsible city, A profitable and prosperous city, Smarter Planning, Taxation, Urban Sprawl

Yesterday, city administration released a report that estimates the expected costs and revenues the city’s recently approved ‘greenfields’ (i.e. new suburban developments) will generate over a 50-year term. These are called our ‘Urban Growth Areas’ and they are essentially the outer 3 corners of our city, and they are very large in scale.

It should come as no surprise that the numbers presented in this report are also very large in scale. To service these areas, developers are contributing a significant amount of money – $3.84 billion, in fact. In addition, the City will spend $1.4 billion in capital to build additional infrastructure to support these communities – things like fire stations, parks, roads and interchanges etc. In turn, tax revenues and utility fees generated by these developments help to recover some of these costs.

However, when we consider the full life cycle of this infrastructure and the delivery of city services to these growth areas, the model shows a revenue shortfall of $1.4 billion over the next 50 years.

In the past, we would have relied on the City’s non-residential growth (i.e. new industrial, business and commercial operations) to help absorb these kind of shortfalls. Today 50% of the city’s tax revenue comes from this non-residential base, even though it makes up just 26% of our total assessment pool (i.e. the number of taxpayers). This means that non-residential taxpayers are paying 2.5 to 3 times more per unit of assessment than residential. This raises two flags for me. First, relying on consistent non-residential growth is a bit of a gamble, especially in this economic climate. Plus, administration’s report shows that we would need an additional $8.3 billion in non-residential assessment growth – city-wide – in order to maintain the current ratio. As bullish as I am on Edmonton, this growth is likely not imminent. The second issue is that we are beginning to ask our business community to pay more and more for our residential growth. Is this fair? For businesses that are at the financial breaking point, I’m not sure increasing their burden of taxes is good economic development policy.  

There is no question that many Edmontonians choose to live in these new growth areas because of the price point these communities offer. However, this leads us to another fundamental question: if we have to increase property taxes well above inflation to pay for this growth and make up the $1.4 billion shortfall, are we really making things more affordable?

So – how do we start to close this gap? It is easy for this topic to polarize us into pro-developer and anti-developer factions, or into downtown dwellers vs. suburbanites. This is not the debate I want to have.

Instead, I want to spark an open and objective conversation – one that will include industry and the public – to analyze how we pay for this growth. I will make this commitment publicly when Executive Committee meets next week. While we will inevitably talk about new or re-tooled revenue generating options, I also want to ensure we talk about other development costs we ask developers to incur and what we can do to reduce them. Collaboration is the only way we will get at the heart of this issue for the benefit of all Edmontonians.

Calgary has recently made changes to their development cost allocations and this has elevated public expectations for us to look this issue in the Edmonton and regional context.

This is a critical conversation happening in cities all across Canada; I intentionally use the word ‘critical’ because Edmonton is simply not financially sustainable under our current growth model. This is one of the reasons the Big City Mayors’ Caucus advocated so strongly for a new deal on infrastructure funding with federal government. It’s also the reason I am hoping that Edmonton can set a new kind of example (as we’re good at doing) for how thoughtful, evidence-based cooperation can set our cities on a more financially sustainable path.

 

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