City councillors may have new office budgets as part of Edmonton’s next four-year budget — but exactly how much those budgets could potentially increase is being kept under wraps for now.
Following an hour-long in-camera session on Wednesday, the council services committee voted 10-1 to bring forward an unfunded service package for the office of the mayor and office of the councillors to council and to keep part of the report in private. Ward tastawiyiniwak Coun. Karen Principe was the lone dissenting vote.
“Anytime you create an unfunded service package, that’s a proposal of something that might increase,” said Mayor Andrew Knack. “But council is going to debate that.”
A draft office and ward budget will be presented to council as part of the 2027-2030 budget deliberations. A portion of the report informing their decision has been kept in private under Section 29 of the Alberta Access to Information Act.
Under the act, information can be withheld from the public if it risks the exposure of “plans relating to the management of personnel or the administration of a public body that have not yet been implemented.”
Knack said keeping the discussion in-camera was important for city employees’ mental well being, so people don’t hear councillors potentially questioning the future of their employment.
Among its peers in Calgary, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Toronto, Edmonton spends the least per-person, per-ward. On Dec. 12, committee directed administration to review ward and council office budgets, as well as look at the potential for carrying office budgets from previous years. Under the existing rules, items purchased must be received by the office within the same year.
A chart comparing how Edmonton compares to a selection of other large Canadian cities which use the ward system – Vancouver does not use a ward system, hence its absence from the chart.
Knack said from his prior experience as a councillor, having just two employees is not enough to keep up with the job.
“As someone who used to serve as a city councillor, having two people there is hard,” he said. “It’s hard to stay on top of all of the issues, on the correspondence and connecting with residents. So I can easily make an argument for my council colleagues to have additional resources to help deal with the massive population increase they’ve seen.”
Knack added increasing ward and office budgets is cheaper and favorable to the alternative option to handle the city’s population growth — which would entail adding more councillors. He estimated that would require several million dollars worth of renovations to city hall for office space for new councillors.
Councillors are given the freedom to set up their offices as they see fit within the budget. The funds are intended to help councillors run their office, represent the city at major events and maintain lines of communication with constituents. Ward budgets are divided into two pools — a ward budget which is subdivided between the 12 councillor offices, and the common budget which allocates $11,278 to cover petty expenses such as furnishings for all 12 wards.
“We have, over my entire time on council, made very minimal adjustments to the ward council budgets,” said Knack. “That has been done to try and make sure we’re finding every available way to maximized the existing dollars to connect with as many people as possible. But you do hit a tipping point.
“Even if you were to add additional resources to the office of the city councillors, they’ll still be much less than every other major city.”
These budgets don’t cover larger office costs, such as office renovations. Those are handled under the integrated infrastructure services department.
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