The Critical Compass Podcast - January 29, 2025


Fixing the City of Edmonton Budget w⧸Jason Bale ｜ A Critical Compass Clip

Edmonton City Council's ＂Show & Tell＂ Public Engagement w⧸Jason Bale Fixing Edmonton w⧸City Council Candidate Jason Bale ｜ A Critical Compass Discussion

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

166.69

Word count

687

Sentence count

—


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with Edmonton City Councillor Jason Kenney to discuss his plans for his first term in office and what he wants to see happen in the coming years. We discuss his vision for the future of the city of Edmonton, what he hopes for the next council, and how he plans to get things done.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 let's predict the future here and we'll say that you get elected for your ward you're
00:00:07.740 edmonton city councilor how do you how do you envision your first term going what are some of
00:00:13.520 the uh like what are you some of your main points that you want to uh that you want to see uh at
00:00:19.020 least being discussed uh when you get the opportunity to put in front of council sure
00:00:23.400 so the first issue that's going to be on the next council's um docket is the budget we're
00:00:28.880 going to have about five weeks or so from election time to budget and i think two or three of those
00:00:34.420 weeks are going to be spent training so there's not going to be a lot of time to make any meaningful
00:00:38.020 change and that's why the outgoing council does the first year budget for the incoming council
00:00:43.960 it's a long-standing tradition i don't have a problem with that practice what i do have a
00:00:48.700 problem with is that they're giving us a 6.8 tax increase next year and the the next council only
00:00:56.340 has five weeks really two weeks to to kind of address it so i'm going through that budget now
00:01:02.800 i'm well i've been going through it for a while and i'd like to see a zero in the first year i don't
00:01:08.560 know if we'll get there but um i'm gonna have to count on whoever else is elected to maybe bring
00:01:15.000 forward some some better optimization of where we're spending money and other ways to kind of reduce
00:01:21.480 that so but zero percent is my target whether or not we get there i think it's a different story but
00:01:27.420 that's in an ideal world that's that's what i get and then the next year after that is about setting
00:01:33.520 the tone and setting up for the the four-year budget and and that one i i think that uh it's
00:01:42.260 going to be interesting because it's the first one where we're doing zero-based budgeting and we build
00:01:45.880 it from the ground up of okay what's important yep throw that in throw that in so i'm hoping we
00:01:51.180 get to see a line-by-line analysis of every budget of every department um that was actually one of
00:01:56.900 the things i had as another event tonight and um that was one of the things that came up and they
00:02:02.080 said well i don't think a line-by-line budget is practical for council to look at and i said you know
00:02:06.920 what that's my problem not yours so if i'm asking for a line-by-line budget you give it to me you
00:02:12.080 don't think it's going to work let me fail yeah right and so but but don't try and prevent me from
00:02:18.020 getting that information so so yeah let you determine what uh what what is relevant what's
00:02:24.940 not yeah and you know what maybe i'm wrong maybe i look at the line-by-line budget and i'm like
00:02:29.260 wow there's so many things here which is part of the problem really but yeah i'm sure that's line
00:02:37.160 i'm sure that's a rabbit hole where you start looking and we're like well this is a big item
00:02:42.280 that's a big item that's a small item what does this even mean what's this code under that like
00:02:47.520 i i feel like when there's so much happening a lot can be the accountability gets watered down
00:02:53.960 when there's so many little things happening it all adds up so and then how do you make a
00:03:00.520 determination on like well okay this is twenty thousand dollars spent on this well oh it's only
00:03:06.400 twenty thousand it's not into the millions so it's kind of like forgotten about but you have
00:03:12.140 a hundred of these twenty thousand dollar spends and that's gonna have a larger impact so at least
00:03:20.880 um pro like asking for the information asking for that clarity asking for that transparency that's
00:03:26.840 that's a huge thing and i don't think there's enough of that so
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