Council code of conduct and rising costs were key talking points at the Alberta Municipalities (ABMunis) spring municipal leaders caucus.
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Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers, alongside deputy mayor Michele Charles Gustafson, Coun. Michael Diachuk and city manager Dion Pollard trekked down Highway 16 to Edmonton for the meeting.
The spring leaders caucus took place March 26 and 27. It’s a gathering of leaders from across Alberta, both rural and urban members.
“We heard from the premier and the minister of municipal affairs,” said Aalbers. “There was an opportunity to have a cabinet bear-pit session where we were able to go to the mic and ask questions of cabinet ministers.”
A variety of issues were brought up for discussion with provincial representatives.
“Some of the biggest issues that were raised were property taxes,” he said.
ABMunis has launched the Property Taxes Reimagined campaign, which aims to share information regarding what’s transpired with property taxes over the last 15 years and funding for municipalities.
“What we’ve seen is, property taxes go up. We’ve seen funding go down,” Aalbers said. “Over 15 years, provincial governments in Alberta have continuously eroded away at the dollars coming to municipalities.”
A notable update for municipalities include the council code of conduct, something Alberta previously did away with.
“The government is bringing back codes of conduct legislation for councils. Ours is slightly different because of our relationship with the Lloydminster Charter Act,” he said.
The topic of information was a big talking point.
“We also talked about information, liability, confidentiality, privacy, helping people understand, namely our residents. There’s open session and closed session,” Aalbers said.
Policing continues to be a challenge across the province with representatives presenting on the second day of meetings.
“On the second day, we basically talked about the evolution of enforcement from the RCMP,” he said. “City police in Edmonton spoke as well as the chief from Lacombe.”
When Alberta’s provincial budget was announced in late February, it raised questions about funding for municipal programs.
“There was a lot of questions about various programs that are very near and dear to the hearts of our municipality,” Aalbers said. “I’ll use FCSS (Family and Community Support Services) as an example. Over its history, we haven’t seen a lot of increases in FCSS funding and preventative services are so much cheaper than acute services, health, social services as an example.
“So, that was a point that was raised with the government.”
Aalbers explained there was a slight increase to $105M for FCSS funding, which covers all of Alberta.
“There’s certainly a lot of requests from municipalities saying, ‘We believe third party, non-profit organizations that deliver so many services in our community that are funded by FCSS, could only do more if they had more resources,'” he said.
The cost of policing continued to be a big issue, something familiar to the Border City, which spent more than $13M on police services in the approved 2026 budget.
“The cost of policing, that model has changed. Again, it’s unique in each province, but Alberta just started charging municipalities that weren’t paying for policing,” he said.
Aalbers says the education tax will increase this year. The municipality collects this tax on behalf of the province, then sends it to the Alberta School Foundation Fund, which distributes the money to public school boards based on a per-student rate.
“What we heard from the premier is, they’re going to have property tax fund 33 per cent of the Alberta Education spend across the province,” he said. “That spend has increased dramatically with new schools and new teachers being hired, salary increases.
“Those have a direct impact. The province is saying that the taxpayer, at the provincial level and the municipal level, will share that.”
Coming up next on the council agenda is the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Convention and Tradeshow, taking place April 12–15.
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