After nearly two weeks of deliberations, city councillors convened on Tuesday to ratify the proposed 2026 municipal operating budget.
This year’s proposed $412 million tax-supported operating budget calls for hiring new city employees, funding new programs to support the city’s growth plan, and transit improvements aimed at making the bus service more reliable.
City staff successfully managed to cap city service budget increases at 2.6 per cent this year, but plan to raise property taxes by 4 per cent before growth.
Services that the administration cannot directly control, including the Thunder Bay District Health Unit (TBDHU), the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS), and the District of Thunder Bay Social Services Administration Board (TBDSSAB), are raising their budgets above the 2.6 per cent target, which the city is using as a justification for raising the tax rate above their goal.
In a meeting on January 26, at the second of four meetings discussing the budget, councillors Rajni Agarwal and Mark Bentz questioned the hiring of 57 new Full-time equivalent (FTE) employees.
Many of the new hires will be employed in two upcoming security and safety-based pilot programs: the Mobile Safety and Security Response Pilot, focused on safer transit rides, and the Downtown Community Safety Ambassador Program, focused on working with businesses in the city’s north and south side downtown cores.
Councillor Bentz wondered aloud what so many new safety personnel could mean for the city: “We continue to hire security guards. Every place has a security guard. We’ve got police being hired… ambassadors, people monitoring. Are we heading towards a police state?”
City Manager John Collin rejected the label, placing blame on the opioid crisis as a challenge municipalities didn’t have to worry about just a few decades ago.
“We are seeing policing costs across the board increase substantially in all municipalities, and we do see most municipalities exploring other options to enhance safety and security, because, quite frankly, in some cases, you don’t need a fully qualified police officer at a fairly expensive wage rate,” he explained.
Among the larger city expenses to come under scrutiny were Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) costs, paid out for city service members who are injured on the job.
City staff determined that the most expensive cost is for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which affects many paramedics and firefighters.
Prevention is one of the focal points of the administration for reducing WSIB costs, with Collin pointing to “slips, trips, and falls” as the primary focus of a revamped safety program.
Collin says the city is “going in the right direction with this,” as WSIB costs are expected to come down 15 per cent compared to last year.
Shane Muir, Chief of Superior North EMS, came before council to offer context on WSIB costs for city paramedics.
He explained that the EMS service has developed wellness services for paramedics in partnership with NWO Psychology Services, which he framed as “one of the most robust wellness programs in the province… It’s been spotlighted by our provincial services as a model to follow, something that we’re very proud of.”
Muir believes the paramedic service’s WSIB costs will go down in the future, arguing that much of the WSIB costs come from historical insurance claims, from before the new wellness programming was developed.
Election costs also came under the microscope during deliberations.
The city uses a reserve fund for its municipal elections, and plans to up its yearly contribution to the reserve by $100,000 per year.
The 2026 election was expected to cost $600,000 when the fund was established, but the expectation is now that it will cost $750,000.
City Clerk Krista Power attributed most of the rising costs to online voting, which has become increasingly relevant as an accessibility tool for those who have difficulty voting.
“There’s additional security measures. There’s additional requirements for accessibility. And staff wages increase every four years as well, and we need staff to run our elections,” she added.
At the meeting on January 28, the third of four, councillors questioned the Thunder Bay Public Library’s (TBPL) increased budget.
Mayor Ken Boshcoff wondered whether the rise of digital services, such as e-books, might lead to decreased costs, but TBPL CEO Richard Togman dashed those hopes.
“There’s no cost savings there,” Togman explained. “In fact, it’s a budgetary issue that we have to manage. It’s significantly more expensive to provide e-resources.”
Togman also mentioned that the library has seen growing demand for its services.
“There’s still really very strong and growing demand for people in this community to physically come into the branches, and we definitely need the staff to be able to accommodate that demand,” he added.
TPBL intends to double its security contingent, from two to four security guards.
The library has had to deal with rising security and safety challenges since the COVID-19 Pandemic, including violent incidents and even one assault on a staff member.
Councillor Brian Hamilton questioned whether hiring new security staff was quantifiably a benefit.
Since the library’s first two security guards were hired, Togman says there has been a 50 per cent decrease in incidents, and an even larger decrease in violent incidents.
Beyond just decreasing incidence rates, he also says both library staff and members of the public report feeling safer and more comfortable in the downtown library branches.
The TBPS proposed a 9.1 per cent budget increase, which earned the most skepticism from some city councillors.
Councillor Trevor Giertuga proposed a motion to send the budget back for police to take a second look, but Council was split down the middle, and his motion ultimately failed in a 6-6 tie.
On Tuesday, City Council re-litigated their motion to send the budget back.
While Councillor Trevor Giertuga continued to frame the vote as a way to send the budget back, Councillor Mark Bentz, who also supported the vote, defined it more as a way to send a message to the province that continued police budget increases are unsustainable.
“It’s not taking this to an arbitration or anything. It’s a symbolic pushback saying we really have to start doing things differently,” Bentz explained. “What we will see if things don’t start changing, and this is across the province, is that police services are gonna start eating into municipal services.”
Councillor Kristen Oliver was absent during the first motion to send back the budget, but opposed the re-vote on Tuesday.
Though Oliver was a former TBPS board member, she held some criticisms in agreement with many councillors in opposition to the police budget.
“It is not palatable. It is not sustainable. We cannot continue this way for years to come,” she said.
But Oliver still believed the budget needed to be passed: “But I think at this point, the police services need support. The community wants to see policing.”
The re-vote on the motion to send the police budget back for reconsideration failed, with 7 councillors voting NO and 6 councillors voting YES.
Councillors Dominic Pasqualino, Kristen Oliver, Brian Hamilton, Andrew Foulds, Kasey Etreni, Shelby Ch’ng, and Albert Aiello voted NO to the motion.
Councillors Michael Zussino, Greg Johnsen, Trevor Giertuga, Mark Bentz, Rajni Agarwal, and Mayor Ken Boshcoff voted YES to the motion.
With the police budget accepted, City Council then voted to ratify the operating budget, voting in favour with a 12-1 vote.
Councillor Trevor Giertuga was the sole dissenting vote.
