CBE Trustees have sent a letter to Mayor Dave Bronconnier indicating they cannot support his proposed transfer of the education portion of property taxes from the Province to the City.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t support his drive to make Calgary infrastructure – school construction and maintenance included – a huge priority.
In the November 3 letter, CBE Chair Pat Cochrane writes:
“Our Board has been advocating for a long-range provincial plan, along with sustained funding, to address the backlog of new schools and to deal with key infrastructure issues for some time now. We support the need to be creative and to work collaboratively with the Provincial Government and the City of Calgary to overcome existing administrative and legislative challenges in order to build schools, utilize reserve lands wisely, and modernize our existing schools.”
Many new Calgary communities will be without schools for the foreseeable future. Three were recently funded, but CBE’s Three-Year Capital Plan identifies ten priorities for this year alone. And it calls for more than $300 Million over three years to keep up with city growth.
It is unclear where the money for new schools will come from. The latest funds were provincial surplus dollars.
CBE’s deferred maintenance backlog now tops $400 Million. Money budgeted for repairs (leaking roofs, for example) has simply not been sufficient to cover expenses, year after year.
Once again, the Province recently provided surplus dollars to fix roofs.
Surplus money is not a stable, long-term solution to public education funding. The Minister of Education has promised a long-term plan – Schools for Tomorrow – and school boards across Alberta anxiously await it.
Meanwhile, Mayor Dave Bronconnier has released his plan.
In its letter, the Board of Trustees thanks Mayor Bronconnier “for elevating the challenging issue of Calgary’s infrastructure needs and look(s) forward to finding creative solutions together.”
The reason Trustees cannot currently support Mayor Bronconnier’s plan – even though they agree with his push for better infrastructure funding – is that it calls for the transfer, from the Province to the City, of a stable source of operational funding. That is, the educational portion of property taxes is currently collected by the Province, then used to fund both infrastructure and ongoing operations within school systems across Alberta.
If, as Mayor Bronconnier proposes, this tax money were collected by the City, then used to fund infrastructure (schools included), it would mean the Province – and school boards across Alberta -- would lose a pool of tax dollars ear-marked for education, a percentage of which currently funds operations.
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