If re-elected, I intend to advocate for:

• Continued focus on delivering City Services more efficiently and maximizing the impact of every dollar. Like all organisations, the City is seeing escalating costs. It has also faced declining provincial infrastructure funding. But tax rates have been going up far below inflation. This has been largely accomplished through finding efficiencies. But it has also been a result of using reserves, which can’t go on forever. Something has to give. The next Council is either going to need to make hard service cuts or increase taxes beyond inflation. To minimize the impact, extreme care needs to be taken with fiscal management.

• Expanding revenues other than residential taxes. The City spends about what other midsize cities spend per capita, but a large portion of that comes from residential taxes. Cost impacts on families need to be minimized by expanding other revenue sources.

• KPI, benchmarking and performance measurement frameworks so we have objective information that can be used to improve services and compare our major cost drivers, including staffing, against other municipalities and (where possible) private sector organisations.

• Asset management. I don’t want to see the community face huge financial road blocks because of poor planning and fiscal discipline now. We need to be taking good care today of our infrastructure. And we need to be taking stock of future large renewal projects and saving for them now to avoid tax shocks in the future.

• Creating a Benefit Based Procurement policy to enable City capital spending to provide better benefits to our local community and economy. Ideas within this policy may include a requirement to source locally when legally allowed to do so, and incentivizing some City Contractors to hire people with barriers to employment. I’d also like to explore awarding some multi-year road contracts to increase contractor competition by giving new companies the guaranteed work needed to expand into municipal work or to move people and equipment into our region.

• AI Governance. Artificial Intelligence has huge potential to enhance City services and save taxpayer dollars by making employees more effective at what they do. However, it also carries big risks and concerns including privacy, outputting poor results, frustrating those who interact with it, copyright, and data security. Because of the huge impacts it will have, Council needs to be involved with setting the policies, strategies, and resources dedicated to AI implementation. It shouldn’t be hand off.

• Ensuring the Police Transition continues to progress well. We need to deliver a Police Service that is reliable, professional and effective. Base services that are equivalent to what was offered under the RCMP contract should be delivered at our below the cost of maintaining the RCMP. Investments in enhanced levels of service need to have their benefits carefully weighed to their costs.

• Create a long-term roadmap and fiscal plan for recreation and culture investments as the City grows. We should have a fiscal plan now so that we can build in the future without having a huge impact on taxpayers’ pocket books. Just like we do with road and water infrastructure, we should be strategizing and budgeting for long term growth.

• A risk management framework. The City’s approach is often very risk adverse. And we should never take on un-necessary risk in certain areas including safety and protection of sensitive information. But there are times where we should take more risks than we currently do in order to deliver better or less expensive services. Council should be talking about risk more to insure we are seizing appropriate opportunities.

• Continue working on the Alberta Municipal Services Corporation Board to insure that the insurance, employee benefits, and electricity it provides to the City (and non-profits in our community) continue to be well priced, sustainable, and flexible.