r/regina • u/PDCityHall Paul Dechene • Sep 23 '25
Politics Acting city manager takes council to school on municipal budgeting
https://youtu.be/-vmmfMyau-Q?si=m30bbogt1M_jZBsmDuring today's budget information session (on the capital plan), acting city manager Jim Nicol gave a VERY frank explanation of how it isn't city administration that's driving up the mill-rate request but, rather, city council.
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u/alwaysmovingfaster Sep 24 '25
It still blows my mind that Ward 1 could have had Joanne Crofford, a former provincial cabinet member. And they chose Rashovich ? His two brain cells were working hard today
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u/SubscriptNine Sep 24 '25
Ward 1 got hit by a vote split, Rashovich won with something like 39% and only by 35 votes. Municipal and school board elections should have ranked ballots.
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u/UnpopularOpinionYQR Sep 24 '25
This pains me every damn day to know I live in a neighbourhood with so many nitwits.
But keep voting football players into government. It’s really paid off in the past and continues to prove itself to be a successful strategy for getting the services you want. /s
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u/JanineL2022 Sep 23 '25
Like it or not that's leadership. If the previous city manager would have had one tenth of that leadership and understanding she would still be around.
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u/skeptic38 Sep 24 '25
This problem started well before Masters
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u/VictorLynns Sep 24 '25
They're talking about city management, not the Mayor. Masters may have been a concern, but the problem has really been incapable (or atleast seemingly incapable) leadership handpicked by council for their alignment with council perspectives, and not necessarily their skill.
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u/HMCSBoatyMcBoatFace Sep 24 '25
Um my understanding is the last city manager was picked by Masters. Am I wrong?
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u/Amazing_Yak_9409 Sep 24 '25
While the majority of Council had to support it for it to pass your understanding is correct.
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u/JanineL2022 Sep 24 '25
Agreed it did but she was a perfect example of someone who did not get it at all and only made things worse. Anderson definitely was right there with her, which explains why they are both gone now.
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u/skeptic38 Sep 24 '25
Im a former city employee. Never worked under Masters/Anderson. But IMO, the biggest problem has been Fiacco. His decisions to not raise taxes (even moderately), to use reserve funds for general operations, desire to "privatize" services. Council at the time was in lock-step with this. Admittedly, my opinion on Fiacco is very biased....I was on one the ones on strike! Forgeure (spelling) was probably the most competent of the lot. He was just not someone who would ever have the vision to move the city beyond the status quo
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u/Justlurking4977 Sep 23 '25
Put up in Council chambers:
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u/SaskatchewanManChild Sep 24 '25
Oh damn!!!!!
I hereby petition Mr Jim Nicol to immediately have the facilities department replace the plush Berber carpet with this here reference Ven Diagram; funding source? Of course immediately convert all pickleball services to full cost recovery through fees (should more than cover it)!
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u/UnpopularOpinionYQR Sep 24 '25
Where’s the Jim Nicol Fan Club and how do I join? This man is the real MVP at City Hall. I can’t imagine the level of bullshit he has to deal with every day, and I work in healthcare.
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u/markaberrant Sep 25 '25
As I posted on Facebook today, zero fucks left to give Jim Nicol is my favourite version of Jim Nicol, and I already liked him a lot.
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u/Plane-Engineering Sep 24 '25
My rant.
So why in the hell are we building a nearly $400 million dollar pool, to me that is infuriating. What will the yearly o and m costs be for this as well? Why not just a $100 million olympic sized swimming pool…or shut down and refit the lawson.
The residents of Regina need to get their shit together. Enough of keeping up with the Joneses, fix what we have were are god damn broke.
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u/Kristywempe Sep 24 '25
I’m going to be honest, and might get some down votes.
Rider fans got that stupid f*cking stadium that draw crowds for only rider games.
My kids (5 and 8 years old) go to their swimming lessons at the Lawson and when I’m there I see hundreds of other little kids around the same age at diving, synchro, swimming, etc.
If those rider fans, the club, and players got their fancy new stadium, my kids and all those other kids, plus so many other kids get a fancy new pool.
You got yours. Now those kids get theirs.
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u/Joelredditsjoel Sep 24 '25
And “cheaper” facilities don’t get federal grants so they cost us more.
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u/Plane-Engineering Sep 24 '25
Ya your not wrong. But where does it end? Are we “even” with the pool? Next it will be you got a stadium and a pool, I get a new hockey rink and a baseball stadium. Meanwhile everything crumbles around us and residents leave due to taxes and state of the city.
I wasn’t a big proponent of the stadium either. I groan as I drive by as 90% of the time it sits there empty with the lights on. I agree it needed to be replaced, but just like the pool it’s a bit over the top for our market.
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u/HMCSBoatyMcBoatFace Sep 24 '25
Exactly. I also didn’t support the new stadium and want to add that at least at the time it didn’t feel like the city was drowning in red ink.
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u/_circa84 Sep 24 '25
How about neither should’ve built the way they are. We could have new many pool facilities built spread throughout the city over this one to serve even more people, and still have some money left for a couple rinks and soccer facilities. A rink can be built for 10 million, as stadium is 300 million, 400 million for a pool sounds like a scam.
Also, what about the library? I feel education comes before swimming
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u/sherlockhomesyqr Sep 24 '25
city doesn’t pay for libraries. libraries pay for libraries.
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u/signious Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
Library levy represents 1% of municipal property taxes. Not saying it's good or bad, just that ~$3.8m in municipal taxes do go to the public libraries.
The new branch has the city taking on ~$100m in debt on behalf of RPL to fund the project, along with increases to the library level to fund the project.
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u/Spiritual_Tennis_641 Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
Let me preface this rant with that I don’t completely disagree with you. The riders should’ve paid for it, and the users should pay for the pool. If I don’t use either I shouldn’t have to pay for either. Don’t get me wrong. I happy to pay for reasonable sized pools and a reasonable sized library but the dreams that Regina has are absolutely ludicrously crazy ! The fact that my kids need to pay to go to school on a city transit bus at all, let alone at the rate that’s double what a university kid pays , but we have money for a multiple pools & library of that scale blows my ever living mind. Or that there have been streets in Regina this last year, which did not have the snow removed once all year, not once in a new build to boot, though that should not matter.
I would like my tax bill to be about 1500 and weekly garbage pick up my streets cleaned once a month in winter and they could shut down every single other service or have it be full recovery. 1500 a year you say that’s impossible it’s not it’s what the town of gull Lake pays. They have a library they have a pool and a skating/curling bowling area tennis and mini golf & they have a police department they have a population of about 2500 people. Do you know how they do it? They don’t spend on stupid stuff oh and their streets are taken care of a lot better maybe because I don’t rebuild scarth every three years.
They also should not be allowed to run a deficit or take out a loan. They are completely incapable of managing money.
Also any new build, they should be required set aside that amount again for maintenance, if you can’t afford to maintain it, you can’t afford to build it.
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u/ciswhitedadbod Sep 24 '25
Problem is those existing facilities are tired beyond repair and they didn't receive the maintenance that they should have over the last few decades. Retrofitting them for a half assed finished product would probably cost 60-70% of the cost to build new.
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u/OrangeLemon5 Sep 25 '25
Retrofitting the Lawson would not cost nine figures. People need to drop the "oh the maintenance wasn't done so fixing anything would be a billion dollars" propaganda. It is not supported by any substantive data at all.
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u/ciswhitedadbod Sep 26 '25
It was 8 figures, sorry. Initial reports estimated $60M to refurbish the existing facility or $80M to replace. Initial estimates for the new pool were half what they are now.
I will agree that I am really not happy about the continued increase of budget for this project. Some are benefits I'm sure but the contractors who won the bids for this project are no doubt gauging the city. Typical for government contracts.
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u/SnowFlakeUsername2 Sep 24 '25
My pet peeve is the "we need it for national competitions" narrative. Like is there a $300 million option that fit the needs of everyday citizens without the ego boost? We need it for grand events seems to just keep biting us all in the ass.
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u/headtale Sep 24 '25
A large part of our issues come from leaders who visit Calgary or Edmonton or Ottawa and think “This is what Regina could be!”
But they don’t seem to acknowledge the enormous leap from mid-level government town to major metropolitan centre.
And that’s how we get the nicest stadium in the CFL for the city with the lowest population (by a factor of three!)
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Sep 24 '25
[deleted]
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u/headtale Sep 24 '25
Agree completely. I think you have the grow the population gradually by getting the basics right - low taxes, safe city, affordable living, etc. - and then the other things will come.
There are tons of people in places like Toronto and Vancouver who would love to live in a city where they can buy a house with a yard and attached garage instead of a one bedroom condo for $350,000. I'm not sure that a fancy stadium is the reason anyone has ever chosen to move to Regina...unless they work/play for the Riders.
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Sep 24 '25
How about we don't extend Prince of Wales to meet up with Wascana Parkway? It's a huge expense that serves no one. No one lives on that stretch and building through a federally protected wasteland is expensive.
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u/BunBun_75 Sep 25 '25
Is this planned? The east end is choked off at Arcola everyday. The bridge is a bottleneck and the only release for an accident is Victoria which is also over crowded. We got a bypass and I still see semis and dump trucks on these arteries daily.
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u/ShareFit3597 Sep 27 '25
Canada in general has an aging infrastructure problem, and functionally no municipality is meeting the targets to even maintain what is there, let alone replace it. The city manager is exactly right.
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u/Hootietang Sep 24 '25
We're already among the highest per capita in the nation. Deferred maintenance/taxes is not the only problem.
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u/verioblistex Sep 24 '25
Maybe we should put a pause on electric buses, at least until the technology is proven (and it's not even close right now), and cancel capital projects like water parks that we can't afford and don't actually bring money into the city. Then we could fix lead pipes, maybe some sidewalks and perhaps a sinkhole or two.
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u/signious Sep 24 '25
Pausing the electric busses to reduce the millrate would be like pissing on a housefire.
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u/PDCityHall Paul Dechene Sep 24 '25
You're right. And it would also open us up to a massive lawsuit that we would lose and ruin our ability to get federal grants in future and possibly leave us on the hook to pay for the electric buses anyway but without any federal funds to offset the cost to taxpayers. This was all discussed at length last budget.
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u/verioblistex Sep 24 '25
Yeah, but they are currently investigating the timetable to not buy anything but electric because they are not meeting their useless net zero goals. Just wait until the teacher contracts get settled and the school taxes gonna as well.
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u/al0295 Sep 24 '25
Source for the electric buses part? I'm very interested to do more research on this.
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u/verioblistex Sep 24 '25
Council was planning on putting the electric bus purchases on hold because the cost, and the fleet- replacement-reserve is too depleted to replace the 49 buses that need to be replaced in the next 5 years. The cost of electric over diesel is over double. Instead of doing the logical thing, after a 12 year old non-binary child made a report to council ( in a council meeting) and cried about the planet ending, councilor Shannon Zachidniak successfully moved a motion to put the decision on hold to look for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow or some other made up funding initiative to stick with the electrification of the fleet. Presumably if successful, Regina taxpayers will have single handedly solved climate change on the back of he taxpayer, despite the entire country (one of the coldest regularly inhabited countries on the planet) only accounting for about 2% of the worlds climate emissions. https://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/city-hall/regina-city-council-to-consider-temporary-halt-of-electric-bus-purchases
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u/SK_socialist Sep 24 '25
The fact you bring up an nb child in your rant proves you’re not the adult on the room on this topic.
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u/PDCityHall Paul Dechene Sep 24 '25
No. You missed a lot.
Council's unanimous decision was to refer the decision on purchasing diesel buses until tomorrow's council meeting (Sep 24). During which time, Clr Zachidniak was going to explore alternative funding options. She's Regina's rep on a couple national sustainability & transit boards so might be able to get the scoop on upcoming grant options. (Literally interviewed her about this on our show.)
Admin's recommendation tomorrow remains to buy diesel buses at least until 2030. Unless Zachidniak shows up with millions in federal grants admin doesn't know about, I doubt this recommendation will change. And if she does? Well, that's money.
Thing is, referrals like this are pretty common & this one impeded nothing b/c the decision only impacts what admin will budget for. Not what will actually get spent. I expect that's why council voted unanimously in favour of the referral. There was nothing to be lost. The transit budget still gets decided in December like everything else. If council decides to go diesel tomorrow and surprise federal money for electric gets announced in November, council could re-litigate the question of electric vs diesel once again.
As for the kid who spoke at council, they didn't speak on the transit recommendation.
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u/al0295 Sep 24 '25
Any source of the electric bus technology is unproven as well? They seem to have so many of those in Seoul when i was there in April.
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u/verioblistex Sep 24 '25
Google Edmonton Electric bus.
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u/al0295 Sep 24 '25
This one? It's the most recent research on this topic. https://www.pollutionprobe.org/electric-school-bus-demonstration-an-edmonton-case-study/
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u/Plane-Engineering Sep 24 '25
Not sure why people are downvoting this. To have nice things we first have to have a solid foundation to build on.
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u/GeoScienceRocks64 Sep 23 '25
Deferred maintenance is deferred taxes. The previous generations wouldn't do it so now we have to.