Councillor Johnston's Big Leak (3 Weeks Late)

Yeah, so it was, I think it was early September.

And just to sort of lay the scene the November budget is coming up.

And this isn't just any budget.

This is the four-year budget.

So this is the most important budget the council will do.

It sort of sets all the priorities for four years.

Subsequent budgets will be fiddling around the margins.

This is kind of the big one.

And they're facing a lot of costs because of infrastructure that has not been maintained and was built out without the appropriate tax base to support it.

We have a lot of miles of road and you know, meters of pipe per taxpayer in Calgary.

And that means it's expensive.

And notably, we actually have, I think, some of the most roads per capita of any city anywhere.

So we're, yeah, we're doing something wrong here, in fact, because it's expensive.

We build,

yeah, not only long roads, but really wide roads.

The roads are absurdly wide in some neighborhoods.

You can fit four trucks down them side by side, it seems like.

It's a bit much.

Wide roads are nice, but so are low property taxes.

You have to make a trade-off.

Yeah, and wide roads are also notably dangerous too.

Yeah, that's how you get people speeding through your neighborhood, which I don't think most people advocate for, but maybe that's a topic for another episode.

But yeah, so we're working on the budget.

And what actually got leaked? Because I know people say that it is the budget.

Was this actually the budget, Denis?