The 2026 Budget

The 2026 Budget: The Narrative, The Reality and the Fix

The Narrative

The narrative from City Hall is that the approved 3.95% tax hike represents a balanced, responsible approach to maintaining core municipal services while protecting the public from runaway inflation. By injecting $3.6 million from the Tax Rate Stabilization Reserve, the intended narrative is that the city can offset rising service costs from external partner agencies like the police and social service boards without overburdening the average homeowner. It is presented as a stable, predictable, long-term fiscal plan to transition smoothly through the election year.

The Reality

The reality is a structural a lack of transparency in accounting practices and a complete lack of accountability.

• The Reserve Hoarding: Council has routinely withheld millions in operational surpluses from the following year's revenue estimates. Instead of lowering the immediate tax burden as intended by the Municipal Act, they have quietly stuffed these surpluses into a massive pool of reserves nearing $80 million.

  
  

• The Structural Deficit: Dropping $3.6 million from a stabilization reserve to artificially lower a tax rate from 4.58% down to 3.95% is a short-term political band-aid. It does not solve the compounding costs of outside service boards, which single-handedly drove 64% of the overall budget increase.

  
  

• The Accountability Challenge: While citizens are told to tighten their belts for an extra $119 a year on average, the city's leadership was caught using corporate credit cards for personal luxury items. Public trust has been entirely compromised by a culture of entitlement that prioritizes internal convenience over strict fiscal discipline.

  
  

The Fix

The fix requires returning the city's focus to strict structural accountability, transparent reserve management, and immediate oversight.

• Step 1: Enforce the Revenue Surplus Rule. Stop hiding municipal surpluses. Mandate that every dollar of year-end operational surplus is legally and transparently applied directly into the next year's budget as revenue. This provides immediate, structural property tax relief without touching essential services.

  
  

• Step 2: Audit and Cap the Reserves. Freeze non-essential contributions to the $80 million reserve accounts. Order a comprehensive, independent structural review of the city's asset reserve thresholds to see exactly how much taxpayer cash is sitting idle instead of being deployed to mitigate the infrastructure backlog or lower the levy.

  
  

• Step 3: Impose a Fixed Efficiency Mandate on Outside Boards. Since policing and emergency boards drive nearly two-thirds of the tax levy increases, Council must stop acting as a rubber stamp. Condition municipal funding uploads to these external agencies on strict internal performance audits and shared administrative service agreements to cut overhead.

  
  

• Step 4: Radical Expense Transparency. Implement a zero-tolerance, real-time public ledger for all council and mayoral credit card expenses to permanently eliminate the "offset" accounting loopholes that enabled recent spending scandals. [1, 4, 9, 10]