On March 5th, the City of Regina unveiled its proposed budget for 2021.
The budget proposes a 2.34 per cent rate tax increase on Regina residents. The increase will go towards funding Mosaic Stadium (0.45 per cent), the Recreational Infrastructure Program (0.5 per cent) and the Regina Police Service (1.39 per cent). Those increases will result in a $100 million police budget, which is 3.6 million more than its 2020 budget.
This has raised the concern of some citizens, especially in wake of calls to defund the Regina Police Service.
https://www.change.org/p/mayor-michael-fougere-call-for-action-defund-the-regina-police-service
“It’s not that clear to me why we’re getting so much money put into this,” said a 25 year old Regina taxpayer. “From what I’ve read and what I am kind of understanding from this budget is this increase is not really beneficial for the city more so than it is beneficial for the Regina police.”
The taxpayer also pointed out that the increase for the fire department ($1 million) is meager by comparison.
The Regina Police Service plans on adding 11 Full Time Equivalent positions, which is one of the reasons given as justification for the budget increase.
[the budget increase] is insane because they’re only hiring eleven people for full time,” she said. “And for other things but in my opinion it’s hard to justify 11 new positions for four million dollars when a lot of the other services that we require are also getting minor increases.”
Regina City Councillor for Ward 1, Sheryl Stadnichuk explains that the rationale (which she says she does not necessarily agree with) behind the 11 new positions and the budget increase is that they’ve been suggested to accommodate Regina’s growing population. She has recommended that there should be similar considerations for the city’s other services by this logic.
“However, I actually want to see what those numbers are for the rest of city staff,” Stadnichuk said. “So what is it for firefighters, have their numbers fallen behind? And what about frontline staff, the ones that are picking up our garbage, fixing our streets, and maintaining our parks, I’d like to know what those numbers are. I think we need that for more context. Because I do think that the city has done a really good job of trying to keep costs down and the major driver is the police budget.”
Stadnichuk explains that councillors can either approve or deny the budget but they cannot litigate over the particulars of a police proposal.
“In terms of the police budget, the process that I was told is that the process is we can’t amend their budget in terms of ‘maybe only add four new staff instead of eight here or’,” Stadnichuk said. “ We can’t go into the budget. But what council can do is either approve or deny the budget. So that’s how the police budget will be dealt with. But the rest of the city budget, we can go into more details.”
The City Council will begin considering amendments on Mar. 24. Stadnichuk encourages people to get involved.
“We welcome anyone from the public if they have any issues or concerns,” Stadnichuk said. You can request to make a presentation to be a delegate to City council to raise your concerns. It’s a good opportunity and I want to hear from people.”
