Saskatoon councillors have little to show after first day mulling budget cuts

Saskatoon city council made almost no progress towards eliminating its $52.4 million budget deficit during its first special budget meeting Thursday.

The first of three budget meetings scheduled over the summer finished in the afternoon after more than four hours of discussion with only one motion brought to a vote.

"I can't imagine I'm the only one frustrated at the end of discussion today," Coun. Sarina Gersher said near the end of the meeting.

"My frustration stems from the lost opportunity we've had today."

Council was slated to go through certain budget line items to begin finding millions of dollars in savings based on a recommendation from administration.

Instead, councillors spent the first couple of hours working through procedures. The chair, Mayor Charlie Clark, called for a break to figure out how to proceed for the unique meeting.

Coun. Darren Hill then raised a motion asking administration to report back with budget implications if the city were to implement four per cent property tax increases in 2024 and 2025, rather than going through each line of the budget individually over the course of the summer and fall.

"We owe it to the administration to send a very clear direction in terms of where we want to end up at the end of budget deliberations," Hill said after introducing the motion.

"It's our job to change policy, but it's the admin's job to make recommendations on operational and even capital impact."

Gersher quickly asked if Hill's motion was possible since another motion was already on the floor. Clark called for another break to discuss the matter with administration.

Administration said the reports Hill was asking for could take months to prepare, and likely wouldn't be presented back to councillors until September.

The original plan for the day was to mull over three options from administration to reduce inflationary requirements for city programs, or the amount of money budgeted to programs to account for inflation. The options ranged from a 50 per cent reduction, a 75 per cent reduction and a combination of both while also reducing other programs more significantly.

Community services, the fire department, and the arts culture and events budget lines were supposed to be reviewed.

Administration recommended option two, which would see a 75 per cent reduction in inflationary allocations, with some budget items reduced further. Those increases would be phased in for future budgets. This was intended to reduce upwards of $20 million of the funding gap.

Instead, there was little discussion over specific budget items or the funding gap facing the city.

"The chance for us to have a meaningful step forward in chipping away at the funding gap — we've lost that opportunity, so I'm incredibly frustrated," Gersher said.

While every councillor spoke about their willingness to introduce service level cuts in the upcoming budget, many lamented the lack of an opportunity to begin going down that path Thursday.

Some councillors also spoke about the difficulty of going through the budget line-by-line during the budget meetings when that work typically takes entire city departments months to complete.

"Us going line by line in summer meetings hasn't always worked. The admin, what we're asking them to do, they're telling us they need three months to take a stab at it, but yet we somehow think we can do it on the fly," Coun. Randy Donauer said.

After plenty of questions and discussion, the motion was narrowly defeated in a 6-5 vote nearly an hour after the meeting was scheduled to end, nullifying any potential progress.

"The administration is best equipped to make those recommendations," Hill said shortly before his motion was defeated.

"Us 11 certainly are not. We don't have the expertise or the skillset to go through every single component of our strategic priorities in civic operations and balance and weigh each line against each line... we don't have that skillset, we don't have that time. The administration certainly does,” said Hill.

Nearly the entire agenda on Thursday will now be moved to the next special budget meeting as unfinished business on July 25.