The city recently released its biennial community satisfaction survey of St. Albert residents, on topics such as quality of life and where city council's and administration's focus should be.
While the majority of St. Albert residents in past surveys (51 per cent in 2019, and 57 per cent in 2017) have said they would be willing to take on an inflationary tax increase to maintain service levels, residents did an about-face in this year's survey, with 51 per cent saying they would prefer a reduction in service levels to avoid a tax increase altogether.
Even Mayor Cathy Heron was surprised to see the shift.
Only 29 per cent of those surveyed in 2021 said they would support a tax increase to maintain service levels — a far cry from past years.
In November 2017, when St. Albert moved toward the use of the municipal price index (MPI) with the release of its 2018 budget, the city began to base its municipal rate on its actual spending on the goods and services that make up the largest portion of its budget, rather than the more widely used consumer price index (CPI), which is based on products and services residents use, such as food and clothing.
The city uses MPI to look at future trends, rather than applying it to each line item in the budget, Diane McMordie, the city's director of financial services, said in 2017.
The difficulty is the MPI is generated by the municipality, while the CPI is developed by Statistics Canada, which sometimes creates suspicion in a community that a municipality will torque the numbers to try to get more money from taxpayers.
Regardless of what our city pays to maintain its services, its residents are also paying more, for everything around them, and clearly feeling the pinch.
As inflation continues to outstrip wage growth — Canada's inflation rate passed the five-per-cent mark last week for the first time in more than 30 years — St. Albertans also face the scarcity of some resources due to supply-chain challenges, and stiffer pricing on food, fuel, and household bills.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the city will also have to tighten its bootstraps and pay more attention to being fiscally responsible than ever.
Now, as the world tries to clamber out of a COVID-stalled economy, is not the time for the city to explore pricey projects of any kind.
Instead, council and administration must hold the line on any unnecessary spending, if for no other reason than to give residents a break on taxes for the next couple of budget cycles so as to boost our local economy, too.
It starts to look frivolous when a municipality spends money on things its residents don't rightly have the purchasing power to buy.
Let's hope that message sinks in over the coming months.
Editorials are the consensus view of the St. Albert Gazette’s editorial board.
