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Mayor’s Budget Working Group

Jan 9, 2020

The City of Winnipeg is attempting to develop four years of balanced budgets – a multi-year budget. This is the first time the City is proposing to develop a balanced budget for four consecutive years (2020-2023).

The Mayor has selected eight  Councillors to work on the four-year budget. The Councillors are members of his selected Executive Policy Committee, the Deputy Mayor and the Acting Deputy Mayor. These Councillors are now meeting behind closed doors, every week, for the next couple of months.  These meetings are not open to the other seven members of the Council or the public.

The Mayor and the selected Councillors on the budget working group will be receiving in-depth briefings from the various department directors and staff and will be deciding which items to include and omit in the upcoming budgets.

  • I am not supportive of this closed-door process to craft the budget, as it essentially eliminates almost half of the Council from being part of the discussions,
  • It removes seven Councillors from providing daily input into the decisions being made,
  • Residents elect Councillors to represent their concerns at City Hall, and this budget process essentially ‘locks out’ almost half of the Council from participating in the budget process.

The Mayor has announced that the four years of balanced budgets will be tabled March 6th. At that point in time, the public and the remaining seven Councillors will be able to review and provide comments.  If it is anything like past budgets, Councillors not on the budget working group will have approximately 2-3 weeks to review four years of budgets, each with billion-dollar operating and capital budgets and most likely will not be permitted to have discussions with department directors before the final vote.

Opportunities for the public to provide input into the four-year budget process occurred in late fall 2019. See Multi Year Budget

Residents are welcome to contact me anytime on issues related to the budget – or to directly contact the budget working group at:

Mayor Brian Bowman: bbowman@winnipeg.ca

Executive Policy Committee:

Deputy Mayor:

Acting Deputy Mayor: