This week, Victoria’s city council took its first look at the Draft Financial Plan 2026-30, and began to realize the challenges ahead of them in balancing this budget.
City Manager Jocelyn Jenkyns began the meeting by outlining some of the difficulties that council will have to face while finalizing the budget include the city’s aging infrastructure, federal and provincial governments cutting back on some spending and expensive initiatives already underway.
In this first meeting, City staff mainly sought to provide council with a presentation to cover the many services provided to residents and how the Draft Financial Plan deliberations will proceed.
According to the City’s report, the main cost drivers in this budget are employee compensation, Crystal Pool debt, other debt taken on for projects like a Government Street refresh, additional infrastructure costs, inflationary costs, and the Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan.
All of these cost drivers alone are bringing the 2026 budget up by $16.2 million.
Furthermore, in this budget VicPD is requesting an increase of $11.6 million. This represents a 13.9% increase to what they got from the City in 2025.
In an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible, the City of Victoria is being faced with four options: operational reassessment, defer or cancel debt funded projects like Crystal Pool and the Centennial Square revitalization, service/program adjustments and lastly, finding alternative or increasing revenues.
The current Draft Financial Plan calls for a property tax increase of 13.3%.
However, the City is aiming for no more than a 4% property tax increase. As the draft budget stands, the city council will have to cut out $38.5 million in spending from the current fiscal plan.
In order to achieve this, a City staff report suggests cutting $18.3 million or 47% in operational reassessments, $14 million or 36% from debt funded projects and $4.9 million or 13% in service/program adjustments. Additionally, the City will have to identify $2.4 million or 6% in additional revenues.
“The financial planning process is about balancing needs and wants to achieve desired levels of service within acceptable funding increases, as determined by Council,” reads the staff report on how council can bring about a lower tax increase for its residents.
“Trade-offs are required and this report provides a range of options, both immediate and for the future, for Council’s consideration. The cost containment opportunities presented in this report strive to contain budget increases while minimizing the impact on services.”
During this session of deliberations, members of council debated the merits of certain programs and services staff had identified for potential cuts.
What was determined is that the items that were identified for removal, but then added back to the 2026 budget are:
- Growing in the City grants – $75,000
- Pro Art Alliance – $8,000
- Youth Bus Pass Program – $630,000
- My Great Neighbourhood grants – $100,000 (down from $152,000)
- Butler Book Prize and Children’s Book Prize – $10,000
- Poet Laureate and Youth Poet Laureate – $8,000
- South Island Prosperity partnership – $242,000
And the programs/services that were cut from the budget include:
- Theatre SKAM – $20,000
- Operations adjustment for response to emergency medical services assistance – $1.1 million
- New traffic signals – $50,000
- Crosswalk installations – $64,000
- Hanging flower baskets – $130,000
Victoria’s council has a tough road of budget cuts ahead of them if they want to get the property tax increase down to just 4%.
The next council meeting on the Draft Financial Plan 2026-30 will be held on November 21st, and following that, there will be another on November 24th. The cutting will continue in the next series of budgetary council meetings.
Council has a deadline of May15th, which is when the budget must be finished and finalized.
