survey<\/a> by the city \u2014 which 10 members of council completed \u2014 found that 70 per cent of responding councillors feel the current ward budget does not meet their needs, and 80 per cent indicated the budget should be increased.<\/p>\nWard 9 Coun. Harrison Clark says a significant budget increase “could be a right step.”<\/p>\n
“I’ve got 17 very well-established neighborhoods,” Clark said. “The workload is becoming real … I think fundamentally, based on what community has asked of us, the expectations that they have of this office, access to more funds to better deliver those results would be immensely helpful.”<\/p>\n
For Mayor Jeromy Farkas, the 20 per cent increase the city is calling for is too high if it doesn’t come with “a demonstrated value for return on money.”<\/p>\n
“I would be reluctant to support that big of an increase unless there was a big increase to the quality of representation,” Farkas said. “So for me, I’m going to be digging into what that 20 per cent number represents.”<\/p>\n
He acknowledged the struggles councillors say they face in serving their constituencies.<\/p>\n
“I am interested in finding other ways that we can improve the the quality of representation,” Farkas said. “That said, it is very difficult being a elected city councillor in the city of Calgary when you think of reporting to 100,000-plus constituents.<\/p>\n
“At a certain point, the quality of representation diminishes regardless of how good of an elected official you are.”<\/p>\n
But he says if the budget is increased for the right reasons, he could get behind it.<\/p>\n
“There is a world where I’d be willing to support even a greater than 20 per cent increase if it meant that each of the wards had a ward office locally,” Farkas said, pointing to the fact MLAs and MPs have their own constituency offices.<\/p>\n
Ward 14 Coun. Landon Johnston also drew comparisons to provincial representatives.<\/p>\n
“Look at MLAs, they work potentially a little bit less than we do,” he said. “And they have ward offices or boundary offices.”<\/p>\n
Johnston says he feels pressure in his office every day and could definitely use “extra hands” to handle constituent concerns, conduct investigations, and help draft notices of motion.<\/p>\n
“I’m okay with a little bit of bump as long as we can use and add value to it,” he said. “I mean, just because the budget goes up, doesn’t mean we have to use the money, and there are some wards that actually might be able to use that more than other wards.”<\/p>\n
Ward funding is on council’s agenda Tuesday, but no changes would come into effect until after fall budget talks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not everyone’s on the same page when it comes to a new proposal to increase Calgary council ward…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[51,6267,47445,2886,1812,47444,47446],"class_list":["post-145366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-calgary","tag-city-councillor","tag-council-ward","tag-harrison-clark","tag-jeromy-farkas","tag-ward-budget","tag-ward-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}