Page 21 - 07_October 2024

OCTOBER
2024
“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.
— Eddie Robar, Interim City Manager
“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 back- ground,” 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 side- walks are clear, my snow is plowed, my grass is cut.
“It gives you the prowess to do other things. When people walk out the
YEG
The Fixer
Eddie Robar is the interim city manager. What’s his plan?
→ 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 quar- ter. 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.”
THE PROBLEM-SOLVER
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.
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?’”
13 PER CENT?
“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
21