When city council meets Wednesday to finalize Ottawa’s spending plans for 2025, expect debate over contentious plans to raise transit prices for seniors and students or whether to spend more on washrooms in public spaces.
Such items are small relative to the size of the budget councillors must approve: $5 billion for operations next year and another $1.7 billion to capital projects. Much of it is locked in from one year to the next.
Some municipal watchers say transit for seniors is important, but this budget season could have seen more debate and discussion about big-picture, longer-term themes affecting a city with a budget under strain.
“Communities … feel there’s something awry,” said Paul Johanis, the new chair of the Federation of Citizens’ Associations (FCA), which represents 65 community organizations.
“For all the rosy messaging, the City of Ottawa just isn’t what it has been. What can we do to put it on a better course?”
FCA members typically make the rounds of committee meetings to give five-minute public delegations. This year, however, it decided to explore long-term concerns and stay out of the weeds on specific, smaller budget issues.
“Over time, you come to the realization that it’s almost a futile effort,” said Johanis of trying to press a city committee to consider or reconsider spending in the month of meetings before the final budget vote.
Thinking long-term
The mayor had always signalled this would be a tricky budget, what with the $120 million structural deficit at OC Transpo.
Mark Sutcliffe has an ongoing “Fairness for Ottawa” campaign and argues the federal government should pay more for properties it owns, while the province should offset transit costs for Ottawa the way it does in the Toronto area.
By the time the draft budget was tabled on Nov. 13, the city had settled on a 3.9 per cent overall tax hike and left a $36 million “placeholder” Sutcliffe felt confident other governments would help close.
Johanis says it was a step in the right direction for the city to acknowledge it needs such funding. That vulnerability is one of several issues that needs to be addressed, he says.
The FCA was also interested in how the city has taken on debt over many years and multiple budget cycles. The city, for its part, regularly points to its high credit ratings and to debt-servicing ratios below provincial and council limits.
The association also wants more discussion about how the city will maintain aging infrastructure over many years.
“Some communities tell us, ‘Livability in our area is just dropping because there’s there’s no maintenance for the assets that we rely on,'” said Johanis.
He points to one recent example where the city decided to no longer refrigerate the rink at the aging Belltown Dome.
Maintaining and expanding infrastructure
For Neil Saravanamuttoo, the costs of maintaining existing roads, sewers, recreation centres and other infrastructure are an even bigger concern than transit.
When the city decides to build any new infrastructure, councillors should also think far ahead to the long-term maintenance costs, says Saravanamuttoo, an economist who co-founded the non-profit group CityShapes with former mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney.
“That’s the number we don’t even talk about, and it’s something that needs to be in the decision-making so we can be take responsible decisions for future generations,” he says.
Saravanamuttoo is looking ahead to 2025, when the city is expected to provide an updated set of asset management plans and look at a couple of key long-range financial plans that date back to 2017.
If the city is under financial pressure, he adds, decision-making at budget time should contemplate if it makes sense to proceed with expensive projects, such as the Lansdowne 2.0 redevelopment or expanding urban infrastructure to rural lands at Tewin.
Transit ripple effects
Kari Glynes-Elliot, an office worker who co-founded the group Ottawa Transit Riders in 2018, was one of nearly 40 people who signed up to speak at the transit commission meeting when it debated its budget. She too finds budget consultations and discussions frustrating.
WATCH | Contentious transit proposals in Ottawa’s draft budget:
With council set to vote on the city budget, a plan to soften transit fare hikes is taking shape. Arthur White-Crummey explains.
Councillors deal with budget issues in silos, depending on the department, Glynes-Elliot said, but the city would do well to look at how so much of what it does is interconnected or linked, from transit to traffic to potholes.
For instance, her group has spoken to university students who use ride-hailing services when their buses don’t come. Volunteers spent time in Barrhaven, Orléans, Kanata, and Stittsville over the summer, speaking to many people who said they were long-time transit users but had stopped riding.
“I just think you’ve got to be worried about that kind of shift,” said Glynes-Elliot. “Once people give up from public transit and start using their cars, they don’t go back.”
Glynes-Elliot feels city council wants to keep taxes from rising for property owners to the detriment of other groups. But even those who never ride transit will be affected by a struggling system or if the city passes costs along to school boards, she sa.id
“It’s all got a very big ripple effect,” she says. “The traffic is just a nightmare these days.”
As all three local advocates put another budget season behind them, they also agree that the process could be better. Yes, the city made some efforts to make the budget easier to understand.
Ideally, however, Glynes-Elliot said the budget would start from a different vantage point, asking what residents most value and want for Ottawa, rather than leaving them feel part of a budget that’s already set in stone.