By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

finding efficiencies

City eyeing at major changes to budgeting process

Jul 25, 2019 | 11:20 AM

Major changes could be on the horizon for how Red Deer city council deals with operating budgets.

During their most recent meeting, City Manager Allan Seabrooke noted there is strong consideration towards going to a three-year operating budget, as opposed to debating a new one every January.

In addition to stating that staff aren’t doing their jobs if it takes council 10 days to complete budget talks, it is likely that starting in 2020, operating budget debate will move into December.

“The budget process is one of the most important functions that administration completes and it takes a huge number of resources and staff time to complete both an operating and capital budget. Some of the changes I’m looking at are really about creating operational efficiencies,” says Seabrooke, who took over as City Manager this spring.

“It will involve doing a lot of the legwork before it gets to council. My experience with budgets is that council gets more into conversations about issues rather than actual budget items, so through some of the changes we’re looking to make, we will have dealt with many of those issues with council before it gets to budget.”

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Asked if that will mean less debate which makes it on the public record, he clarified that wouldn’t be the case because much of the debate will happen prior to budget during regular meetings.

Seabrooke also spoke to the flexibility council will have in terms of reacting to budgetary situations on the fly.

“When you create a multi-year operating budget, it will be based on a number of assumptions and you will always maintain council’s ability to go back and alter those assumptions or to change the factors of a multi-year budget based on whatever’s happening in the economy. It’s not difficult to do that, but it definitely is best practice.”

Councillor Vesna Higham is admittedly clamouring for a multi-year operating budget process.

“When we conclude the budget in January, the very next day, administration begins the work of preparing the next budget, so if you think about how any high level managers and City staff are engaged directly for essentially 11.5 months of the year in preparing the budget, when we already do a three-year forecast on the operating side and 10-year for the capital budget, we could very easily (do this),” Higham surmises.

“Lethbridge (in 2000) made the decision to go to multi-year budgets, many other communities have multi-year budgets, and I’m very pleased that our new city manager has put that on the agenda to review. When we’re looking for cost-cutting measures for our citizenry, this is huge.”

Higham is also a proponent of “opening up the budget base” for scrutiny, which she explains would make each department more accountable for what they’re spending each year.

“A shift towards a two or three-year budget would allow us to hopefully be flexible to the community in any given year, but to also lay out a longer-term plan for our community so that our citizens, stakeholders and staff have more certainty in terms of what’s coming,” added Mayor Tara Veer.

The earliest a multi-year budget could come into play is for 2021, and it would possibly be a two-year budget, before moving to three-year budgets going forward.