Don’t expect anything too flashy out of the budget decisions that Edmonton city council will be making this fall, says a councillor with a couple of budget cycles under his belt.<\/p>\n
“I don’t foresee any large city-building projects, at all, on the table,” Coun. Aaron Paquette of Ward Dene told Taproot. “If anything, it’s just maintenance \u2014 we need a bus garage, that’s about it, some fire halls. New (recreation) centres? Absolutely not.”<\/p>\n
Paquette, who was elected for his third council term<\/a> in October of 2025, joined Episode 364 of Speaking Municipally<\/a> to discuss how he’s approaching the 2027-2030 budget.<\/p>\n Edmonton makes most of its operating and capital budget decisions in four-year chunks<\/a>, with annual adjustments as needed. So the decisions made this fall will shape the rest of the term. After public engagement throughout the first half of this year<\/a>, administration will release its proposed version of the 2027-2030 budget in early fall. Council will debate and make amendments over several days in late November and early December.<\/p>\n Administration has repeatedly said that limited funding is available to even maintain the assets that already exist, let alone build new ones. There is a $2.8-billion gap<\/a> in what it would ideally spend on renewing city infrastructure in the proposed 2027-2030 budget, it says.<\/p>\n Paquette said that’s an old refrain. “I would say, what is new in that message? When have you not heard that message?”<\/p>\n And yet, council has recently reduced the scope of two large projects \u2014 the Lewis Farms Community Recreation Centre was scaled down to keep its increased budget from bloating even more<\/a>, and the southeast transit garage will be smaller than originally planned<\/a>. Provincial funding for local infrastructure has decreased from about $420 per capita in 2011 to about $150 per capita in 2023<\/a>. When accounting for inflation, the number is even more stark, Paquette said.<\/p>\n “It’s a massive cut, probably by about two-thirds, and so you can imagine that’s having a great impact,” he said. “In fact, our infrastructure (renewal) deficit almost exactly aligns with that deficit from the provincial cuts.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don’t expect anything too flashy out of the budget decisions that Edmonton city council will be making this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-799269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}