Regina Minute: Issue 126

Regina Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Regina politics

📅 This Week In Regina: 📅

• There will be a special City Council meeting tomorrow at 1:00 pm, the first of two Council sittings this week, dedicated to the City's 2027 general operating budget. Administration's preliminary forecast shows tax-supported operating expenses growing by $44.7 million next year just to maintain current service levels, driven by $8.65 million in added staff costs, $7.4 million more for the Regina Police Service, and $6.7 million in additional debt servicing. Those pressures are equivalent to an 11.9% mill rate increase, which forecasted revenue growth would reduce to 7.01%. To stay within Council's target of keeping Regina's property taxes in the lowest 25% of comparator Canadian cities, Administration says the 2027 increase must be capped at 5.81%, and proposes to get there by cutting the transfer to the transit fleet reserve by $3.1 million and trimming $1.4 million in services, including less frequent road line painting, ending contractor support for dust suppression, eliminating towing during spring street sweeping, and delaying the outdoor washroom strategy. Tomorrow's meeting picks up the budget overview that was cut short on July 28th by a technical failure of the audio-visual system at City Hall, and adds a new service-by-service breakdown of the forecast. The budget series continues on September 8th, ahead of final deliberations in December.
  
  
• City Council will meet again on Wednesday at 1:00 pm, its second sitting of the week, and one of the items on the agenda is a tabled motion titled Project Service Prioritization that could reshape how the City budgets. The motion would direct Administration to classify every City service into categories such as core, discretionary, and hybrid, complete with 2026 cost breakdowns, and to develop options for a three-to-five-year plan that would reduce the property taxes collected by 5%-10% by optimizing discretionary services while protecting core ones. A work plan would come back to Council for approval, with a finalized report with recommendations due at the Audit and Finance Committee on October 29th, in time for the 2027-2028 budget deliberations. Wednesday's agenda also includes a bylaw granting a property tax exemption to licensed non-profit childcare centres.
  
  
• Also at Wednesday's City Council meeting, Council will vote on formally designating a property at 2704 Saskatchewan Drive as required for a municipal purpose, a step that would let the City acquire the land even if negotiations with its owner fail. The City has been negotiating with the owner for several years to buy the land for the widening of Saskatchewan Drive, a project first approved in 2017, but no agreement has been reached. The Executive Committee approved the designation at its August 19th meeting. Chad Jedlic, the City's Director of Land, Real Estate and Economic Development, told the Committee the designation "preserves the City's option" under provincial expropriation law while negotiations continue in good faith. The Saskatchewan Drive Corridor Plan, approved by Council in 2024, identifies the property as required for the planned road widening, with the remaining land possibly used as a buffer area or greenspace. Budgets for property acquisitions along the corridor were approved in 2022 and 2023.
  
  
• Wednesday's Council agenda also includes amendments to the City's Affordable Housing Lands Policy that would significantly expand who can buy City-owned land below market value without a public offering. The changes would open eligibility beyond non-profit housing providers to for-profit builders, start-up housing providers, social enterprises, and Indigenous governments or economic development corporations, and would raise the appraised value at which a property can be sold or leased below market value without a public offering from $60,000 to $100,000. A new Neighbourhood Side-Lot Program, modelled on one run by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, would let North Central property owners buy a City-held lot immediately adjacent to their own. Council has approved $5.5 million from the Housing Accelerator Fund to buy properties for the City's Housing Land Bank, which could eventually hold several hundred properties, but Administration says existing non-profit providers can absorb only about a dozen properties per year. Administration argues the expansion would return underutilized properties to active use faster and avoid long-term holding and maintenance costs.
  
  
• Kurtis Doney, Regina's Deputy City Manager of City Operations, says an additional stretch of 11th Avenue will open soon as crews work west toward Albert Street, with pavement about to go down at the Lorne Street intersection. The four-year downtown revitalization project remains on track to wrap up by the end of October, though Doney said final touches such as tree planting could wait until 2027 if snow arrives in October. He said a wet June caused some delays, but hot, dry weather through July and August let crews make up the lost time. Other major projects, including the Albert Street North bridge replacement at Ring Road and the Speaker's Corner drainage work prompted by a 2023 storm sewer failure, are also expected to finish by the end of October. Doney pointed to the repaving at the south end of Lewvan Drive, completed with long hours over 12 straight days, as an example of the City moving quickly where noise impacts on residents allow.

🚨 This Week’s Action Item: 🚨

🪙 This Week’s Sponsor: 🪙

This week's sponsor is you! We don't have big corporate backers, so if you like what you're reading, please consider making a donation or signing up as a monthly member.

Having said that, if you are a local business and are interested in being a sponsor, send us an email and we'll talk!