{"id":147244,"date":"2026-07-28T21:40:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T21:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/147244\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T21:40:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T21:40:18","slug":"city-councillors-to-vote-on-20-per-cent-proposed-increase-to-their-ward-budgets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/147244\/","title":{"rendered":"City councillors to vote on 20 per cent proposed increase to their ward budgets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Calgary city councillors may have significantly more funding next year, pending their vote on administration’s recommendation this week to increase their ward budgets.<\/p>\n

At their regular meeting Tuesday, council will vote on a city staff proposal to increase their ward budgets by 20 per cent, to increase the office of the councillors’ budget by 9.6 per cent, and to raise the council services budget by $133,000, effective 2027.<\/p>\n

Councillors have latitude to use their ward budgets as they see fit, with most of the budgets going toward hiring and paying their staff or public engagement. The budgets cannot supplement their own compensation.<\/p>\n

The proposed increase \u2014 which administration says compensates for population growth and inflation \u2014 would bring each ward budget up from approximately $374,000 this year to roughly $455,000 in 2027.<\/p>\n

The city is also recommending ward budgets increase incrementally throughout the next four-year budget, to equal just below $495,000 by 2030.<\/p>\n

Regardless of this week’s vote, the additional funding still requires approval in November, when council deliberates the city’s 2027-30 budget plan.<\/p>\n

Comparatively, councillors’ ward budgets equalled $287,000 back in 2017, according to the city’s report.<\/p>\n

Surveyed anonymously, seven council members \u2014 only 10 of 14 responded \u2014 felt their current ward budget is not meeting their needs, according to a city report, while eight of the 10 respondents indicated ward budgets should go up for the next four-year budget cycle.<\/p>\n

\"Councillor<\/p>\n

Councillor Dan McLean during city hall council in Calgary on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025.<\/p>\n

Before the item was discussed Tuesday, councillors who scrummed with media expressed lukewarm opinions about the proposed budget increase.<\/p>\n

Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean said he’s opposed to the increase, arguing it would be hypocritical for local elected officials to seek funding reductions in some departments while simultaneously voting to increase their own office budgets.<\/p>\n

“There’s nothing wrong with hard work,” he told reporters. “That’s what we get elected to do. Yes, there’s more people in our wards, but I would suggest just hiring really good staff and working extra hard.<\/p>\n

“I’m not here to criticize other ward offices and what they spend their money on, but I think it’s incumbent on us as elected officials to work within our means and to treat the taxpayers’ dollars very seriously.”<\/p>\n

\"Ward<\/p>\n

Ward 4 Coun. DJ Kelly speaks with media on Feb. 3, 2026.<\/p>\n

Ward 4 Coun. DJ Kelly also said he’s fine with his current budget, though noted other councillors may require additional budgets, due to the high volume of land use applications in their wards.<\/p>\n

“As a result, having a staffer on board that can manage those, I think, makes a lot of sense for them,” he told reporters.<\/p>\n

“But for wards like mine, I think the budget that we currently have is appropriate. So it really is about balancing the desire for equality across all the wards with the need for some of the offices that don’t have enough budget to be able to do that.”<\/p>\n

Kelly and McLean both said compensation for their employees eats up the majority of their ward budgets, with the rest going toward hosting town halls or communications.<\/p>\n

‘Not all wards are created equally’<\/p>\n

Two years ago, council struck an independent commission<\/a> to assess the 14-ward system, marking the first time since 2014<\/a> that Calgary’s ward boundaries were put under the microscope.<\/p>\n

The ward boundaries commission was mandated not to explore whether Calgary should add additional council seats \u2014 the current 14 wards have been in place since 1976 \u2014 but to assess the system’s current effectiveness and recommend potential changes.<\/p>\n

Jordan Pinkster, who chaired that third-party commission, said that in a city growing as fast as Calgary<\/a>, each new term of city council is required to represent a higher population of constituents than their predecessors.<\/p>\n

Back in 1976, each councillor represented an average of 33,500 constituents. Today, the average population per ward is more than 100,000 people, or more than the populations of Red Deer or Lethbridge.<\/p>\n

“The role has evolved and become more complex,” Pinkster said.<\/p>\n

If there’s no political appetite to increase the number of councillors in Calgary, then raising their respective budgets is a logical way to handle the additional workload that comes with a higher number of constituents, he added.<\/p>\n

“If the political consensus is that 14 wards is the number we’d like to have in Calgary \u2014 and that’s certainly the position of the last couple councils \u2014 the only way they’ll (manage the city’s growth) is with regular budget increases,” Pinkster said.<\/p>\n

“100,000 people is a lot of people to be representing. Static budgets certainly don’t help them address the pressures that emerge from that huge population growth in their wards.”<\/p>\n

\"Pictured<\/p>\n

Pictured is Calgary Municipal Building on Monday, Oct. 5, 2020.<\/p>\n

He said the ward boundaries commission’s most radical recommendation was that councillors’ budgets should not be equal, but vary based on the complexities of each ward.<\/p>\n

For instance, he noted some wards have more than twice as many community associations than others, while some have large industrial areas or bustling commercial hubs, such as downtown.<\/p>\n

“The biggest one in terms of ward budgets was a recognition that not all wards are created equally and that population alone is not a determination of the workload for each particular office,” he said.<\/p>\n

Council is set to vote on the recommendation Tuesday night.<\/p>\n

Catch up with the day’s headlines, curated by our editors and delivered to your email inbox at lunchtime on every business day. Sign up now for the Calgary Herald Noon News Roundup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Calgary city councillors may have significantly more funding next year, pending their vote on administration’s recommendation this week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[47839,51,35408,4324,8819,47840,29926,41546,34425],"class_list":["post-147244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-budget-increase","tag-calgary","tag-calgary-municipal-building","tag-councillors","tag-downtown-calgary","tag-office-budgets","tag-population-growth","tag-recommendation","tag-ward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147244","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=147244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}