The two people vying for St. Albert's mayor's chair have differing views on how to handle St. Albert's high residential taxes.
Challenger Shelley Biermanski is pushing for a city hall hiring freeze and a shift to zero-based budgeting while incumbent Nolan Crouse is calling for a full efficiency review and hard questions on the necessity of all capital expenditures.
Biermanski is one of a handful of council candidates advocating for zero-based budgeting, a method that requires justification of all spending each year based on projected upcoming needs.
"There's no other way to establish what everything is spent on," Biermanski said.
The main flaw in the current budget process is that city departments only have to justify their requests for new dollars, not previous funding levels, she said.
"They haven't accounted for years on what they actually in fact spend each dollar on," Biermanski said. "Not that zero-based budgeting has to be a process until the end of time … I think it's time to just sit down and start fresh."
There may be elements of zero-based budgeting that are worth adopting, Crouse said, but he's not sold yet.
"I'm not a bandwagon jumper on this one until I hear the merits," he said.
Crouse experienced zero-based budgeting about 20 years ago in the pulp business. The concept was to form a budget for the upcoming year without looking at the previous year's expenditures.
"The confusion that it caused and the amount of work that it was costing to do it annually, was not something that we stuck to," he said.
He's advocating for a full efficiency review, preferably by directing city managers to scrutinize every bit of spending.
"It is a request that every department stop what they're doing for a moment and ask the question, is this value added and is it money that we're spending that needs to be spent?" he said.
Biermanski would like to see incentives for city staff to find efficiencies.
Limit tax increases?
A number of council hopefuls are pledging to hold tax increases to inflation or a fixed percentage.
Crouse said he believes in the principle of continuous improvement rather than setting "arbitrary numbers."
"Arbitrary numbers don't get continuous improvement necessarily, it gets you to build toward your arbitrary number, " he said.
Biermanski feels a limit could be a good idea but wouldn't bring the best possible results every year.
"The best possible number you can do for people is what you should be working for, not just a number that's set on paper," she said.
To freeze or not to freeze
Biermanski feels she can bring tax relief without touching services.
"There's a lot of spending that's done outside of services that could be eliminated," she said. "Your special events planning … art purchases. I think a little bit from each area would add up to a lot."
She's an advocate of a hiring freeze, stating that city employment has increased significantly in recent years (the opening of Servus Credit Union Place is a likely contributor.)
Crouse said a hiring freeze would mean not extending some city services, such as waste pick-up or policing, to growth areas like Erin Ridge North, which could add 3,000 residents in the next five years.
"Anybody who's advocating for [freezes] is not considering that we might have new humans moving into this place," Crouse said. "It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous."
He feels the greatest potential for short-term tax relief could come from scrutinizing capital spending.
