Check out our Budget 101 series to learn more about how our municipal budget comes together.

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See how the municipal portion of your tax dollar is spent, based on the 2024 budget: Tax dollar breakdown

Learn more about the various revenues sources that fund The City’s budget. Revenue Sources

Budget 2025 will have a greater focus on community education and engagement to better inform what our citizen’s value most in our services. Through May and June, we launched an education and engagement campaign to help citizens understand what goes into a municipal budget and give you the opportunity to tell us what your priorities are. An online survey and budget tool were available, and we also held several pop-up style opportunities for in-person input. This information was compiled into a Public Participation: Spring What we Heard Report (pdf) report. 

We also completed a second round of engagement this fall and will be sharing a second What we Heard report soon. 

As part of the long-term financial and business systems plan, we prepared a Budget Charter to guide the standards by which the 2025 budget will be developed. The Charter outlines how administration and Council will work together to arrive at a budget and outlines the following:

• Guiding principles
• Success factors
• Leadership and governance
• Expectations and accountabilities
• Budget 2025 Administrative Mandate
• Critical path

We have defined success in 2025 as:

• Council will gain an understanding of what our base services are and how they are resourced.
• Our budget will be recognized as more clearly understandable.
• Management and staff will have a greater understanding of our financial position, a greater connection to the overall mission and a clearer sense that we are together in this.
• That we will endeavor to contribute funds to grow our reserves.

As a result of the Charter, this budget will also include:

• A strengthened service level review process: Service levels have been further defined and department executive summaries have been developed to provide the financial context of service levels.
• Revenue enhancement recommendations: We will be making recommendations to Council on what areas of revenue need to be reviewed and considered for change in order to enhance the performance of all revenue areas The City utilizes.
• Renewed 10-year capital plan: Council will receive a renewed 10-year capital plan, and the capital budgets will be considered outside of, and ahead of the overall tax supported operating budget.

As highlighted during the 2024 budget process, changes are needed in order for The City to attain a sustainable financial position. It’s critical that we advance our financial governance, systems, and processes to reach these goals. Both Council and administration are aligned in the need for the long-term business and financial system plan, which gives us a blueprint for securing our fiscal future.

The long-term financial and business systems plan will assess our current financial maturity and performance against that of our desired future state, and will identify the changes we need to make to mature our financial management to a level comparable to other municipalities. Specific areas of work will include:

• A long-term, future focused financial modelling: An overall assessment of our future financial needs including but not limited to reserves, debt, and cash flow forecasts.
• An assessment of our administrative policies, organizational structure & resourcing in the lens of appropriate financial governance and management.
• An overall financial risk profile.
• The creation of a financially focused scorecard that identifies the measurements that will demonstrate a comprehensive view of our ongoing financial performance. This tool will serve to provide our organization the insights and evidence on how we are performing. Additionally, this scorecard will be benchmarked against comparable communities to demonstrate where Red Deer is positioned amongst its peers.
• An assessment of our financial reporting and digital systems ensuring that we have and are providing the right tools for our desired performance in the future.