Public safety issues, investments highlighted on second day of Calgary’s budget talks

Leadership from police, fire and other public safety services in Calgary were on hand at city hall Tuesday on the second day of budget deliberations.

City councillors spent the morning asking questions of each service and department, as they weigh several public safety spending items in the proposed budget.

The spending proposals for crime, safety and policing include more than $21 million in new and ongoing funding, as well as $22 million in one-time and capital funding.

Some of the proposed spending includes funding transit safety initiatives, additional resources for the fire department, a response team to help manage problemed properties as well as more community peace officers to enforce noise and traffic safety bylaws.

Transit Safety

Funding the city’s Transit Safety Strategy remains the largest public safety line item, with a request for $15 million in operating funding and an additional $2 million in one-time funding.

The money would be used to help hire 65 additional transit peace officers to speed up response times to less than 10 minutes for incidents along the network.

Work is already underway on some aspects of the strategy, which was approved in October, such as establishing five safety hubs for officers along the LRT line and dividing the network into three districts.

Aaron Coon, the city’s chief of public vehicle standards, said there have already been improvements following the hiring of 43 peace officers since June.

“As we’re putting more peace officers on the transit system, security guards and then our outreach program, we’re seeing that improvement,” he said. “We’re really excited about the work.”

Last month, Calgary Transit announced ridership has surged to around 92 per cent of 2019 levels, prior to the drop during the COVID-19 pandemic, with major rebounds on the LRT line as well.

Sharon Fleming, the director of Calgary Transit, said recent customers satisfaction surveys have shown a 13-per cent increase in transit users feeling safe.

“Having more people around creates a perception of safety, but it also provides a support network for individuals if something does go wrong,” she said Tuesday.

Calgary Police Service

The Calgary Police Service did not request any additional funding in the budget adjustments, beyond the increase already budgeted for 2024.

City councillors asked several questions of police chief Mark Neufeld around policing resources, especially with the recent and seemingly rising gun violence on city streets.

Neufeld told councillors the service has enough resources to respond to and investigate shootings, but faces challenges when a large police presence is needed in different places simultaneously; he noted recent duelling protests over the Israel – Hamas conflict in the downtown core.

“The work that we’ve been doing around call diversion and demand management is paying dividends; our calls for service have been going down notwithstanding the face there’s been a lot going on in the city,” Neufeld told council.

“But if you were to talk to members on the front line… the number one issue you’ll hear from people is workload and staffing.”

Neufeld said despite the decreasing call volume, the “acuity” of the calls are “higher than they’ve ever been.”

However, the police service is anticipating an additional 50 officers in 2024 to help ease those challenges, following a funding announcement from the province earlier this year.

According to a provincial government spokesperson, the province is engaged with the City of Calgary, Calgary Police Commission and the police service to finalize a funding agreement for the additional officers.

Neufeld said once the agreement is signed, half of the officers are expected to be recruited in the first quarter of next year, with the remaining officers in the second quarter of 2024.

“The intent of the agreement is that the officers are forward facing and would impact community safety,” Neufeld said. “We’re earmarking them for transit, for public spaces in downtown and also hotspots around the city.”

Calgary Fire Department

Following a $10-million investment in one-time funding during last year’s budget deliberations, the fire department is proposing city council makes that funding permanent.

The request calls for an additional $3.4 million in ongoing annual funding during the remainder of the budget cycle to staff a second Medical Response Unit

The first medical unit was deployed in the downtown core and quickly became “the busiest unit in the city” due to an exponential rise in overdoses in the core, according to fire chief Steve Dongworth.

The plan would be to deploy the second Medical Response Unit in the downtown core, where Dongworth expects it would begin responding to up to 5,000 calls annually.

According to Dongworth, the unit would free up firefighting resources downtown.

“That has a domino effect for the communities around downtown,” Dongworth said. “If the rigs downtown are tied up, we pull in rigs from the suburbs sometimes to make up for that. It just makes the system more reliable.”

City council will return on Wednesday morning to continue questions of various city departments.

Councillors will then begin debating the budget adjustments, and will have the opportunity to make changes before a decision is made.