Council rejects call to compile dollar-by-dollar spending records

A Calgary councillor’s last-minute request for the city to compile a dollar-by-dollar breakdown of city spending from the last two years was rejected Tuesday, with his colleagues questioning the urgency of the motion and whether such a high level of granularity is necessary.

Before the agenda was approved for Tuesday’s regular council meeting, Ward 14 Coun. Landon Johnston brought forward an urgent notice of motion that directed administration to provide councillors with “transaction-level general ledger actuals” in a PDF format that showed all city departments and business units’ transactions from the last two years.

Johnston’s motion called for the fiscal breakdown to be provided before council considers the city’s upcoming budget in November.

Because he had not first brought his notice of motion to the executive committee, he attempted to add it to the regular meeting agenda as an urgent item of business, which required a two-thirds majority of support from his colleagues.

Johnston said his motion presented an opportunity to provide council — and the public — a more granular look at each business unit’s spending from 2025 and 2026, as council prepares to deliberate the 2027-30 budget next month.

“It’s not about micromanaging; it’s about patterns, and it’s about finding where priorities are being spent going forward,” he said when introducing the motion.

“The urgency is that if we get this done today, we can have these business units’ actuals before budget starts.”

Chief financial officer Les Tochor told council the city would need to recruit at least 10 additional workers, at a one-time cost of $100,000, to go through the city’s spending records line-by-line and redact sensitive information.

The work would take those 10 consultants roughly 75 to 80 hours to complete, Tochor predicted, and then the city’s financial team would still need to review the work afterward, likely using artificial intelligence to do so.

Providing the compilation to councillors in the format requested by Johnston would require 14 million additional lines of code, Tochor added.

“To my knowledge, I don’t know of any other municipality that provides this level of detail,” he said.

Council voted down adding Johnston’s urgent motion to the agenda in a 6-9 vote. Those who voted in support included Couns. Rob Ward, Kim Tyers, Jennifer Wyness, Dan McLean and Mike Jamieson.

Some in the majority claimed they didn’t receive Johnston’s motion until Tuesday morning — though they noted he did post about it late Monday night on social media — and as a result, had little time to consider its merits.

After 11 months of requests, I’m bringing an urgent motion tomorrow for detailed City spending records (transaction-level actuals) for Council and staff.

I exhausted every option to get this without extra cost or direction. Admin says tomorrow is the last day they can prep it… pic.twitter.com/AZV5CUug5c

— Landon Johnston (@Landonforward14) October 27, 2026

“In order to make this type of decision for this amount of work and not being able to review this ahead of time, that just makes it very difficult for me to support this as an urgent matter, given that members of the public knew more about this coming into today than we did,” said Ward 8 Coun. Nathaniel Schmidt.

Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said the city already publishes a detailed budget overview that compares how much was budgeted with how much was spent in the last three years. Council also receives a 1,000-page budget package, he said.

“My team personally spends hundreds of hours going through this,” he said. “It has a breakdown of costs. This is all public. It has salaries, materials — everything, year over year.

“Fundamentally, we have this information. We don’t need this additional 14 million lines of code to do our duties.”

Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot said such a highly detailed review of spending may be feasible for a small town or city, but for a municipality with 1.6 million people, is not realistic. He doubted the work Johnston was requesting could be completed for $100,000.

In defence of his motion, Johnston said the info he was seeking would help council compare approved budgets with the city’s actual spending.

“Yes, you can show line actuals that show what was budgeted versus what was spent, but I think a lot of taxpayers would like us to do more due diligence to ensure those dollars are being spent,” he said.

“If you don’t see how important that is going into a budget with a double-digit (tax) increase, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

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