When Andre Corbould vacated the city manager post in early April, Eddie Robar was named as the interim replacement.
This would be like being the back-up quarterback who gets tapped on the shoulder to take over with the team down two touchdowns late in the fourth quarter. Heading into the upcoming budget session, Robar has to present City Council with suggestions on how to reduce a predicted 13 per cent tax hike for 2025.
Robar is dealing with a maintenance budget shortfall — you know, the money that needs to be put aside to fix our LRT lines and buses, to maintain City buildings and vehicles — that’s in the billions. He’s got inflationary pressures that have hiked the prices of materials and fuel. And, like many cities across the country, Edmonton is still playing catch-up after COVID-19 stalled the economy.
“Across the country, we’re not unique,” says Robar from his office at City Hall. “That spread of tax increases are happening all across the country. We’re all facing the same things, coming out of the pandemic. We did a lot of work during the pandemic to try and make things easier for Edmontonians, but, when you do those kinds of things, that windfall catches you in the back end. It’s about ‘pay now or pay later.’ We’re in that pay-later phase.”
Robar sees himself as a practical, problem solver. He’s not a career manager — he’s worked on the operations side of the City for nearly a decade, including Edmonton Transit Service. He says not being a career bureaucrat allows him to bring a different perspective to the city manager’s office.
“That’s the unique thing about me being in this position. I don’t know if they’ve ever had somebody in this role who comes from an operations background,” he says.
And he says the City, in order to meet citizens’ expectations and not drive taxes higher, has to take a hard look at itself — and focus on what the ratepayers actually want.
“What are the day-to-day operations of the city, and what does it take to maintain that? And, at what service levels? So, you’ve got to balance that service expectation with what you can afford to deliver.”
He’s frank about wants and needs: If a city does that well, it earns the trust of citizens to take on bigger, stretch goals — from building new infrastructure to tackling social ills. It’s a social license.
“When you walk out your door, you want to see a well-managed city. And what does that well-managed city look like? It’s all of these things — my sidewalks are clear, my snow is plowed, my grass is cut.
“It gives you the prowess to do other things. When people walk out the door and see that, they can say ‘Yeah, go build a rec centre, go do this and go do that.’ But when they walk out their doors and don’t see those things, they’re saying ‘Why are we doing that and why aren’t you focused on this stuff?’”
“Thirteen per cent is not acceptable to us either, on the administrative side. I think there’s an element of getting ourselves back to a place where we’re looking at sustainability of the city in a way that makes sense. So, when we look at 13 per cent tax increases, that’s not sustainable over a long period of time. If we look at what’s hitting us right now — that tsunami coming out of the pandemic — those are the things that are hitting a lot of people.
“So, for us, it’s a question of how do we work our way around this? I’ve been with the City for eight, almost nine years, now. With me being in this role, the changes that we need to make, to trim some of the costs from the City side of it and bring ourselves down to a more reasonable tax rate, is something we’re working on. Certainly, from a priorities’ perspective, we have to look at what’s important to what’s not as important to run the City and those core services. We’re trying not to impact the core services that we know council and Edmontonians are looking for, like transit, trimming grass and snow and ice.”
Robar says this coming budget gives the City the chance to “reset its foundation.” And it’s not just about taking the pressure off the 2025 tax bill. According to Robar, it’s about “what does it mean to be a sustainable city going forward?”
That means not only trying to reign in the budget for 2025, but to put the City on a path where these sorts of debates don’t become an every-autumn thing.
“There will be lots of stuff. Going from 13 per cent down to a seven per cent increase, which is where we were, you’re talking about a pretty substantial amount of money. That’s anywhere from $40-$50 million. When you’re looking at that kind of impact, you’re going to have to make tough choices. We make sure to put the stuff in front of them [council] and give them our best professional advice, that these are the things we think, as administration, that we would look at removing or stop doing. And there will be stuff we’ll slow down, and there will be stuff that we show up with and we say ‘we should keep doing this’ or ‘we should lean into this a bit more.’
“I always look at it and say, how do you look at what runs a city and what does it cost? What are those gaps? We have structural issues that we haven’t dealt with for many years, in terms of inflationary pressures and stuff that was approved that maybe hasn’t been funded the whole way, or not hitting revenue targets like we should. And those structural issues need to be fixed in order for us to be sustainable going forward.”
While homeowners will look at their tax bills and sigh, the truth is that commercial and industrial ratepayers carry more of the freight. They pay higher rates, and their contributions help offset what homeowners need to pay in order to keep the city running.
Robar says that over the past decade, the city’s industrial tax base has dropped by about 12 per cent. Much of that has been lost to neighbouring communities, so it puts Edmonton in an awkward position. The City is supposed to be aligned with its neighbours as part of a greater region, so it’s not cool to try and win business back from Sherwood Park or Leduc County. What the City needs to do, Robar believes, is look at attracting complementary industries and sell what Edmonton offers — transit, affordable housing, amenities.
“We have to go after industries that make sense. Maybe it’s not the big smokestack or the big carbon-capture plant or something like that. It’s the periphery companies that come with that, that we’ll be targeting for the city itself.”
Robar knows that the relationship between the City and the province isn’t great. It’s politically tense, and we have seen a lot of finger-pointing from both sides.
Case in point: The province pays out “grants in lieu of taxes” to municipalities. The province doesn’t pay tax on its properties, but instead has a voluntary grant program that acts as a replacement for taxes. Because it’s voluntary, the Alberta government chose to cut those grants in half during the height of COVID.
Robar says that cut is equal to about one per cent of the tax bill. If the province restored the grants to their full value, the tax pressure would immediately drop from 13 to 12 per cent. Edmonton is disproportionately affected by the cut because it has the lion’s share of provincial buildings — being the capital, and all.
But he says it’s important to create a better relationship with the province. And, he believes he’s suited to carry the olive branch to the Legislature.
“A benefit to me in this role is that I spent a lot of time in transit. In the transit world, you’re dealing with partisan politics and those kinds of things all of the time. It’s allowed me to explore those options when it comes to how you repair a relationship and how you drive to success. You start to win the small things. You get your wins and your successes where you can. We have a great opportunity in the city to build a hydrogen economy. We’re very aligned with where the province is on that issue.
“Certainly, the tax thing is an issue, going through the pandemic and getting a reduction. Everybody got hit with that reduction, but Edmontonians are disproportionately hit because most of the facilities that the province has reside here in Edmonton. We’re definitely shouldering the load for most of the province when it comes to a 50 per cent cut to grants in lieu of taxes. It’s important to keep the conversation going. My end of it is to make sure we’re having that conversation and see what we can do to correct those actions and outcomes.”
A big reason Edmonton (and other cities) fall into giant budget potholes is because of the way they buy things. If the province or feds provide infrastructure funding or transit funding, the cities make sure to use it to the fullest, and that means they have spending blips where they buy a bunch of buses all at once, or finish a bunch of projects at the same time.
Thing is, these items need to be replaced or maintained. And you create replacement or maintenance bubbles in the budget.
An example? You may have heard how ETS needs to replace hundreds of buses. This is because, 20 years ago, the City got some funding for transit, and 350 buses were purchased in short order. They all aged out at the same time — so, now, without grant funding, Edmonton is on the hook to replace hundreds of buses all at once.
Robar said the City needs to look at extending the lives of some vehicles, and then retire some early, in order to turn the purchasing bubbles into a straight line (the same thing can happen with hiring waves, Robar adds). Better to buy 20 buses a year than 400 in one go. It takes the pressure off the maintenance and replacement budgets.
“How do we not cause that problem 20 years from now?” he asks.
“For me, coming into this role, I asked myself if this is something I could be interested in. I wasn’t sure about that. I don’t mind taking the helm for a little bit, let’s see where we can go. I look at myself and want to have an impact on the work we’re doing. That, for me, is the assessment period of whether or not I enjoy something. But I think I am having the impact that I’d like to have, not only on the council conversation.
“In transit, you’re always in development. You’re always building things. It’s more transferable skills than I imagined it being. I feel pretty good about where we’re at, even though we’re going through a pretty big bump here before we get where we need to be.”
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Edify
