acknowledged earlier this month<\/a> he leaked confidential budget documents showing preliminary discussions on the city’s four-year budget cycle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nCity officials stressed the document released Tuesday is not a financial budget decision, rather it aims to identify potential areas of refinement ahead of budget deliberations in November. <\/p>\n
Numbers not set in stone, mayor says<\/p>\n
Farkas emphasized the numbers are still preliminary and will likely change, pointing to last year’s budget deliberations where council began with a six-per-cent property tax increase before lowering it to 1.2 per cent.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said councillors have heard from several city departments about their needs going forward, and it will be up to council to “whittle” those numbers down.<\/p>\n
For instance, on Monday the Calgary Police Service released its budget plan, requesting 73- and 19-per-cent increases to its capital and operating budgets, respectively, part of which would go towards hiring more than 300 additional officers by 2030. <\/p>\n
“We’re going through a budget process where a lot of people are going to be hearing ‘no,'” Farkas said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“For us to say yes to the need of public safety investments for police, for fire, for essential infrastructure, we need to say no to those nice-to-haves.”<\/p>\n
WATCH | Preliminary budget doc shows city council considering 15% property tax hike:![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790736610_190_default.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Preliminary budget doc shows city council considering 15% tax hike<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Calgary councillors voted to release a confidential preliminary budget document. As CBC\u2019s Brendan Coulter reports, city administration’s proposed approach would see a 15-per-cent property tax hike for a typical homeowner in 2027, although that number is expected to change during budget deliberations this fall.<\/p>\n
Coun. John Pantazopoulos brought forward the motion to release the budget information, saying it will help him have more informed conversations with residents.<\/p>\n
“Fundamentally, now I can finally have that conversation with people in Ward 6 and across Calgary and say, ‘What outcome do you want?'” he said. “And as a result of that, then we can narrow down to a conversation about percentages.”<\/p>\n
Potential trade-offs of tax hikes<\/p>\n
In the document, city officials pointed to the potential compromises of minimizing tax hikes.<\/p>\n
They said an increase of less than four per cent would lead to a worse service level, while an increase of 4.2 per cent would hold the line but “defers pressure into the future,” including upgrades to critical infrastructure, emergency response expansion and transit service growth.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790736611_101_default.jpg\")
Coun. Kim Tyers says she doesn’t think Calgarians will support a 15-per-cent property tax hike, but she is confident council will find a way to keep taxes ‘as low as possible.’ (Brendan Coulter\/CBC)<\/p>\n
A tax hike of roughly 20 per cent next year, however, would result in improved city services, officials said on Tuesday.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Ward 1 Coun. Kim Tyers said she does not believe Calgarians will support a 15-per-cent property tax hike, and she is confident council can find ways to keep taxes low and still address key concerns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It would be great if we didn’t have a tax increase, but as low as possible,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
City administration will present a complete draft budget to council in November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":914811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194293],"tags":[49,2798,48],"class_list":["post-914810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-ca","tag-calgary","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914810","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=914810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Text](\"https:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/a\/assets\/texttospeech.svg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790736609_704_default.jpg\")
Mayor Jeromy Farkas said Tuesday the proposed property tax numbers are preliminary and will change as council enters into budget deliberations in November. (Brendan Coulter\/CBC)<\/p>\n