Issue 1- $52 Million

Issue 1- $52 Million

First, the $52 million is NOT a surplus! Don’t know why some people intentionally call it a “surplus”. It's actually the portion in our property tax provincial government collected for building new schools; but they honestly returned it to Calgary property taxpayers when they decided to build less.

My position on how to handle the $52 million dollars (totally should be $260 million)?  There’s one and only one way: return it back to all property taxpayers in full.

Reasons:

1.      Council tried different excuses to keep it since April 2013, long before the flood!

2.      If City can use the flood as an excuse to keep the money?  Why can’t provincial government to use same excuse to keep the money in the next 4 years?  Or they can just need to deduct the same amount from our portion when releasing money to all municipals to pay for the flood losses.

3.      This $52 million was never on annual budget, and they will take it for granted to spend an extra $52 million every year until FOREVER!