We’ve Heard it all Before
- allardkg
- Oct 12
- 4 min read
Bringing back the Medicine Hat Advantage of low taxes and utilities.
A number of candidates are talking a lot about reducing spending as if that has not been done before, that this is a brand new thought.
They are not being specific in where they want to cut the spending.
They come with meaningless platitudes and slick advertising.
They say what people want to hear, making promises they know are impossible to keep because that is the game of politics.
As the old joke goes, the word politics can be broken down into: - poli (poly) meaning many, and - tics (ticks) which are blood sucking creatures.
I Can Smell the BS in the Air
Some candidates are talking about keeping taxes low or even freezing them yet hiring more police officers to address the crime rate. That is just flat out BS - you cannot hire more police without doing any or all of the following:
Raising taxes,
Raising fees,
Cutting services
Did You Know?
The police budget lost $1million per year when the province put a restriction on photo radar locations. We lost another $1million per year when the province cut the GIPOT (Grants In Place Of Taxes) in half.
Government buildings such as the courthouses do not pay taxes, the City receives the GIPOT instead.
Budget Amendments
I want to get our spending under control. I have seen far too many high priced “budget amendments”. If Council is going to approve a multimillion dollar ask in the middle of the year, why even bother having a budget?
The funding requests are often for very good causes and when they are brought to council after the budget has already been set, council has a hard choice to make. They feel a lot of pressure to approve the budget amendment because if they don't, they look like the bad guy. After all, who wants to say they were the ones that voted against giving money to very worthy organizations such as HALO or the Women’s Shelter? If council feels it is necessary to fund these organizations, then it should be in the budget when it is being considered instead of being an afterthought halfway through the budget year. I'd like to have a certain amount of money set aside each year for these requests - once that is gone, it is gone. Our current Council has already made some progress in this but I don’t think it goes far enough.
Our Energy Division
Other candidates say it is a Hard No to sell our energy division or bring in an MCC (Municipally Controlled Corporation), that the City successfully has managed our energy division for over a hundred years and we should keep doing that. Sure we did well for a hundred years but that was when we had gas and oil to sell. That money is gone and it is not coming back.
At this time, I feel I do not have enough information to make a decision one way or the other on either subject. There is a lot of confidential information I am not privy to which may sway my decision. Until I know more, I am currently not in favour of selling the energy division or creating an MCC.
Did You Know?
According to the most recent budget our gas division is projected to lose well over $10 million per year (pg 120).
The MCAF
Some candidates talk about getting rid of the MCAF (Municipal Consent Access Fee) which is on our utility bills.
Okay, great, assume it’s gone.
I know nobody wants to hear this - one cancelled fee will likely result in another being approved or an increase in utility rates. The City has had to dip into reserves to balance the budget year after year after year...
Yes, there is a huge amount in reserves but most of it is restricted meaning it is already earmarked for certain expenses and cannot be spent on anything else.
Has Your Candidate Been Paying Attention?
The residents of Medicine Hat deserve candidates who can hit the ground walking instead of crawling. Those of us who are elected will need to be able to read and absorb large amounts of information in a short period of time. Even those of us candidates who have been paying attention will have a lot of extra information to absorb.
I have been following, writing about, and analyzing council business since early 2021, almost 5 years.
I’ve attended or watched nearly every single council, commission and committee meeting in that time as well as reporting on it - it has literally been my job since I was hired by the Owl (formerly Community TV) in April 2022. I never applied for the job. Thomas Fougere invited me for lunch and asked if I would write for him. Since then our growth has been exponential, even more so since Alex McCuaig joined us last year. I have gone from only doing only print work to appearing on camera for multiple live shows every week as well as doing on camera interviews and media scrums.
Since early 2021 I have read tens of thousands of pages of documents (the Oct 6 agenda packet alone was 691 pages long).
Reading is my superpower - I can not only read a large amount of material but understand and retain that knowledge. Of course because I watch or attend every committee and commission meeting, it means I have that much less reading to do when it comes to the Council Meeting Agenda Packets. I know what happened in the meetings and do not have to rely on the minutes which tend to leave out a lot of the discussion.
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