Councillors react to $60 million in budget cuts

CALGARY (660 NEWS) – By a vote of 13-1, city council has approved the 60 million dollar budget cut plan.

The City said 48 different services will be affected including 80,000 fewer transit hours and 115 jobs will be lost.

“We have worked cross-corporately to put forward reductions that align with the guiding principles set by Council. Those principles included a least harm to services approach and treating employees with dignity and respect, “said Glenda Cole, City Manager. “The reductions included $11.3 million in efficiencies.”

Councillor Evan Woolley admits the tax shift onto the business community caught them completely off guard.

“We had never seen an increase like this in any municipality, in one class of tax bracket and had never seen something collapse so quickly.”

Councillor Ward Sutherland says these cuts are a wake-up call for the city:

“When we have these crises, it gives us also opportunities to kind of look at things a bit differently and then value that and value in the future and say, I know this is not going to change and those challenges are going to continue to happen so how am I ready next time, what are we really looking at?”

WATCH: Sutherland discusses the budget cuts on Breakfast Television 

Sutherland adds, “it’s really valuing the front line workers and management to really look at efficiency and listen and react.”

Woolley said he’s worried about the cuts that have to be made but given the situation going on in the downtown core, changes had to be made:

“The level of service that we’ve been able to deliver and in fact that all of our employees have been able to deliver incredibly over the last decades is just not possible in the same way that it was under that old operating model.”

A city committee will now look into shifting the tax burden away from the business community and Ward 9’s Gian-Carlo Carra thinks Calgarians would rather pay more than face additional service cuts.

“They realize they have a structural problem and they move to an austerity approach to try and cut down their costs and then their citizens generally say, ‘we don’t like austerity. We’re willing to pay a little bit more for the things that we value.”

That, however, is not the view that Woolley shares, believing that’s not what homeowners want.

“In my conversation with my constituents, it is a very tough sell for them to make up that amount of money when we’ve had so much job loss and so much pressure on individual families. The struggle of this is who takes and how do we share in this burden?”

The motion comes after a marathon session by council in both chambers and behind closed doors, that included a public comment period Tuesday.

The city will hold a news conference Thursday morning at 10:30 to reveal more details on the budget cuts.