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Edmonton city councillors made a number of budget decisions Wednesday that could push a 2026 property tax increase from 6.4 per cent to about 6.9 per cent.
Council has been moving money around for the last few days as part of its fall budget deliberations, trying to keep its property tax increase under control. A number of operating expenses were funded from other line items, but the tax levy was turned to in order to fund Explore Edmonton.
It previously funded Explore Edmonton year over year with one-time funding. Councillors spoke about the importance of providing financial certainty for the organization after failing to do so for years.
Explore Edmonton, which is the city’s tourism marketing organization, will receive $11 million each year from the tax levy, which for 2026 amounts to a 0.47 per cent increase.
Coun. Michael Janz said he believes the move will pay economic dividends for the city.
“I think that we’re making wrong-headed decisions … if we’re shortchanging on pieces that are going to grow our economic development, grow our city and actually put us in a more financially resilient position in the future,” he said.
Some councillors said they thought council should have instead funded the organization for only one year again, finding money from a source besides the tax levy.
“I think pretty much everyone wants to fund them on an ongoing basis, it’s just a matter of when,” said Mayor Andrew Knack, who voted against the motion.
Coun. Aaron Paquette said under normal circumstances he would have preferred to find a tool besides the tax levy to fund the organization. However, because the city’s financial reserves are already so depleted, he believes it was the best option.
“It’s just too constrained, so I’ve got to go with this one,” Paquette said.
Transit cleaning and accessibility
Two items that did not originally see funding in administration’s budget proposal were maintaining service levels for transit-cleaning services and Dedicated Accessible Transit Service (DATS).
But councillors chose to pay the nearly $3 million required to keep DATS service levels up.
Without the additional money, administration said there would be a 10 per cent reduction in service, which works out to about 120,000 trips per year.
Administration said it has been seeing more demand for DATS since the pandemic.
The city’s living wage policy has made hiring cleaning staff for transit stations more expensive. Because of those increased costs, cleaning service levels were going to go down, with less contracted cleaning staff hired.
Council dedicated about half-a-million dollars to maintain service levels while paying a living wage, using money from the Epcor dividend.
Parking lots and peace officers
A motion from Coun. Erin Rutherford to put revenue from a city-owned parking lot in Old Strathcona into general revenue narrowly passed. The move will see $438,000 in 2026 — and money generated by the parking lot on an ongoing basis — go to general revenue.
The lot was previously leased by the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, but council voted to not renew the lease in 2023. The long-term plan is to convert the lot into a district park, as part of a host of upgrades planned in the Old Strathcona Public Realm Strategy.
The money collected from paid parking at the lot was originally going into a reserve for the public realm strategy.
Rutherford said the money should be put in the city’s general pot in order to spread the use of the money across the city, especially considering the fiscal gap Edmonton is experiencing.
“We talk a lot about how we’re seeing less and less unconstrained funding from the province,” she said. “And by doing these kind of one-offs, we are also doing that to ourselves and constraining our budget.”
Janz represents the area, which is in Ward papastew, and said people want to see their parking money go into improving the area.
“If we’re going to be serious about investing in what is truly the most magical part of our city … this is exactly the kind of strategy that we need to do,” he said.
Council also voted to keep plans to hire two additional peace officers to patrol the downtown core, which has a new downtown park and a pedway system that will open next fall.
A final day of deliberations will take place on Thursday, where council will have the chance to make any final changes to the budget — and the corresponding property tax increase — for the next year.
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