Regina Minute: Issue 130

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

📅 This Week In Regina: 📅

• City Council meets tomorrow at 1:00 pm for the fourth of five preliminary budget sessions, this one covering Administration's proposed capital spending from 2027 to 2031. The forecast totals $975.63 million over the five years, with $263.48 million in 2027 alone, and it leans on $113.95 million in new borrowing that peaks at $95 million next year. The largest single project is a new indoor aquatics facility to replace the aging Lawson Aquatic Centre, at $169.72 million over the five years, $118.66 million of it in 2027. A separate appendix lists another $148.29 million in projects Administration wants Council to see but has not funded, including $26.13 million for an operational yard facility and $18.15 million for a transit storage garage expansion. Administration also notes that $10.03 million for Regina Police Service facilities is being covered by diverting money from the program that maintains civic buildings, which needs $16 million a year to hold its condition targets and is already $130 million short. The report asks only that Council receive and file it. The real budget decisions begin on December 7th.
  
  
• On Wednesday, at 1:00 pm, Council meets again, and one of the items on the agenda is the winter maintenance review for the 2025/2026 season. Administration wants to expand City sidewalk clearing beyond the roughly 245 kilometers it already covers, adding urban corridors, select City Centre locations, and school zones starting in November, using the $110,400 Council approved in the 2026 Budget plus $166,000 it would seek in 2027. A separate proposal to have the City clear sidewalks along the rebuilt Dewdney Avenue and 11th Avenue corridors would cost $288,180 a year, though the Accessibility Advisory Committee recommended dropping it and spending the money near schools, day homes, daycares, and medical centres instead. Administration is also asking Council to raise snow storage site fees for commercial hauling contractors through the 2027 budget, from $15 to $17, $25 to $29, and $35 to $41 per load, which would bring in about $65,000 more a year. Those rates have not changed since November 2016. At Council's direction, Administration also examined plowing alleys only after 10 centimeters of snow rather than five, which would cut plowing from about six cycles a season to three and save roughly $120,000, or $2.50 a year for a property on a 50-foot lot. Administration does not recommend it, noting that fewer than 1% of the 328 alley service requests it received last winter asked for less service.
  
  
• Also coming back to Council on Wednesday is the housing strategy itself, and one piece of it has already been settled. A proposal to create a registry of Regina's rental properties failed at Executive Committee on September 16th in a 5-5 tie, which counts as a defeat under the City's procedural bylaw. Ward 7 Councillor Shobna Radons had asked for a report on setting up the registry and requiring landlords to hold a licence to rent out property, noting that 30% of Regina residents are renters and that a registry would put compliance records in public view. Councillors Dan Rashovich, George Tsiklis, Mark Burton, Jason Mancinelli, and Clark Bezo voted against, several of them questioning why the City would regulate a relationship the province already oversees through the Office of Residential Tenancies. Burton said the motion seemed one-sided and that there are bad landlords but also bad tenants, while Bezo warned the rules could have a "cooling effect" on the rental market and on developers. City project manager Bill Neher told the Committee that staff had considered a registry for the new housing strategy but set it aside after landlords warned during consultation that higher regulation and fees would push units off the market entirely. City staff say Regina would have been the first urban centre on the Prairies to bring one in. Mayor Chad Bachynski was not at the meeting.
  
  
• City Council is also weighing a proposal to charge for on-street parking around the Regina General Hospital and the Pasqua Hospital. Ward 5 Councillor Sarah Turnbull opposes it, pointing out that the fees are expected to raise only about $110,000 a year and that all of that would go to running the program itself. Turnbull, who has a child with complex medical needs, says the charge would fall on people already in their worst physical, emotional, and financial state, many of them living off donations, and would do nothing measurable for municipal tax rates. Streets around the hospitals currently carry a two-hour limit, and a parkade is available for longer stays at $12 for a full day. Dennis Ogrodnick, who travels to one of the hospitals regularly for cancer treatment, said travel and parking already consume a significant portion of his monthly budget and that Saskatchewan residents already pay taxes for health care. He argued that municipalities should show more compassion.
  
  
• Six Regina Councillors have signed an open letter to the Government of Saskatchewan and Social Services Minister Terry Jenson asking the province to carry more of the cost of homelessness. Ward 6 Councillor Victoria Flores, who wrote the letter, says the City's Community Well-being team gave the ministry a list of roughly 20 people at the Core Community Park encampment who have been assessed and are ready to move into housing, and that no meaningful update has come back. The letter asks for three things: dedicated multi-year funding for permanent supportive housing in the next provincial budget, income assistance rates under the SIS and SAID programs high enough to cover actual rents, and a cross-ministry protocol within six months to stop people being discharged from hospitals and correctional facilities into homelessness. Flores notes that the province's supportive housing commitment under its homelessness approach came to 155 units for Regina and Saskatoon combined, while Regina's own count found nearly five times that number in need. The Ministry of Social Services declined to address the claim about the 20 people, citing privacy, and said it has put more than $10 million into homelessness services in Regina. The letter was also signed by Councillors David Froh, Sarah Turnbull, Shobna Radons, Shanon Zachidniak, and Jason Mancinelli, who are asking the Minister to meet them before the end of September.

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