Edmonton Mayor Mandel - tax fighter?

With the very left-leaning Edmonton City Council (#yegcc), it's good to see the mayor using common sense in using departmental surpluses to lower property tax increases as much as possible.

I wanted to give credit to him because I didn't vote for him last election and supported City Centre airport guy David Dorward who then went onto become an MLA in the crappy crappy Redford Alberta PC government.

But back to city government management.  Empire-building by managers and bureaucrats in city government is huge.  There's no incentive to cut costs or become more efficient because if the allocated budget isn't used up, then what was used is the new budgeted amount, so the incentive is reversed--to use up the budget and then cry for more money.

Every time you hear a government or party wanting to cut departments, you hear unions and bureaucrats bellowing that services will suffer.  Bullshit.  Find a way to continue to deliver those services with less money.  Corporations do this every single day.

If the majority of Edmonton City Council had the balls to stand up to the managers, then property taxes would be going down instead of this trend:

1989 5.50
1990 5.50
1991 6.50
1992 4.50
1993 0.00
1994 0.00
1995 0.00
1996 0.00
1997 6.00
1998 5.00
1999 4.00
2000 2.30
2001 2.80
2002 2.40
2003 4.90
2004 5.30 1% for infrastructure borrowing + 4.3% for operations
2005 4.60 includes 1% for infrastructure borrowing
2006 3.20 includes 1% for infrastructure borrowing
2007 4.95 includes 0.75% for infrastructure borrowing City partially used education tax room created by province 
2008 7.50
2009 7.30 2.5% for total tax bill - includes 2% for Neighbourhood Infrastructure Renewal, Waste Services becomes a utility, not funded by taxes
2010 5.00 includes 2% for Neighbourhood Infrastructure Renewal
2011 3.85 includes 1.5% for Neighbourhood Infrastructure Renewal
2012 5.35 includes 1.5% for Neighbourhood Infrastructure Renewal