Right-leaning council will work on fiscal solutions piece by piece

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on October 19, 2017.

Medicine Hat city council has moved to the right following this week’s municipal election.

Every four years the citizens remake local government at the ballot box. The next four years are the real test of how the new group of nine will perform.

However, voters returned two former aldermen who ran on strong “fiscal conservative” platforms, while leaving off two previous members best described as centrists.

It also gives a majority to those who ran squarely on cutting city spending rather than raising taxes to dig the city out of a $23-million budget hole.

Phil Turnbull, who had a strong base of support to become mayor in 2013, arrives back on council where he previously called for heavy budget scrutiny and wasn’t afraid to be a lone voice calling for wage rollbacks.

New council member Darren Hirsch certainly seems poised to support a clampdown on budgets.

Sitting ninth and 10th in the results — off council — are Bill Cocks and Les Pearson, both outspoken boosters for public services.

It’s not all black and white, however.

Turnbull and Hirsch both say city services are valuable, but need to be efficient as possible.

Pearson spent two terms as a councillor voicing the concerns of low-income residents, seniors and the disabled, but was also a strong voice questioning city debt levels.

Cocks was hardly an enemy of private enterprise but was also an unabashed supporter of the city’s position in land development (itself a major point of contention in large corners of the local business community).

However, add together Turnbull, Hirsch, second-term councillors Jim Turner and Brian Varga with Mayor Ted Clugston, and you come up with a majority of the nine-person council.

It’s far too much to say that creates a voting block.

Municipal decision is largely on a case-by-case basis. It’s rarely based on ideology alone.

That’s also the case for other councillors — veterans Julie Friesen, Robert Dumanowski, and Jamie McIntosh — based on their voting records.

Newcomer Kris Samraj, whose leanings are not well known, also joins council.

Those nine will inherit a budget program that says tax increases are unavoidable and need to be offset by program cuts and spending restraint.

The Financially Fit budget aims to find answers for $23 million in long-gone gas and power revenue that once tamped down property tax bills.

Next year, the second of two 4.5-per-cent annual tax increases will get the city one-third of the way, but still $16 million in saved up cash reserves will have to bridge the gap.

We all know there is a large contingent of citizens that have long running beefs with City Hall which they charge is inefficient and harmful to business.

We also know that citizens in general vehemently oppose program cuts and fee increases, or, at very least, those that affect them personally.

Large changes to the heavily tax-subsidized transit system caused a flurry on the eve of the election.

The largest budget cut was the closure of the Medicine Hat Arena. The problem facing the new council is that they can’t close the Medicine Hat Arena twice.

To get the savings required to balance the budget without tax increases, the Arena would have to be closed 30 times over.

How the budget will actually be balanced will undoubtedly remain a decade-long work in progress.

Right now, there is only a council with a makeup that many right-leaning voters have been calling for.

The results will come piece by piece over the next four years.

(Collin Gallant is a News reporter. To comment on this and other editorials, go to https://www.medicinehatnews.com/opinions.)