TRAFFIC CAMERAS: A Big Win For City Staff

Published 04/22/2025 · Updated 04/22/2025

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Not sure I’m following the logic of the city auditor general’s recommendations or the city management’s response.

“RECOMMENDATION 1 – REVISIT APPROACH FOR ALLOCATING RED LIGHT CAMERA PROGRAM REVENUES The General Manager, Public Works, in collaboration with the General Manager, Finance and Corporate Services, should revisit the approach for allocating revenues from the Red Light Camera program to the Road Safety Reserve Fund to ensure alignment with Council’s expectations. The recommended allocation should be presented back to City Council for approval.

MANAGEMENT RESPONSE 1 Management agrees with this recommendation. The General Manager, Public Works and General Manager, Finance & Corporate Services, will review how revenues from the Red Light Camera program are allocated to the Road Safety Reserve Fund – to ensure they are in alignment with current base budget allocations and Council’s expectations. The approach will be presented to City Council in Q4 2025 as part of the 2025 Road Safety Action Plan report or when the 2026 Draft Budget is tabled. This recommendation will be completed by Q4 2025.”

It’s clear in the AG’s report that money that should have gone into a specific fund as directed by Ottawa City Council has been funnelled into the general operating budget and the police budget. Where in her recommendations does the AG say that the money incorrectly sent to those two places should be recovered and placed in the Road Safety Reserve Fund which is where it belongs?

There was clear direction from council as to how these funds are to be allocated. Unless and until council changes that direction, that is what city staff has been told to do.

How hard is that? Money was improperly put into two financial pots where it doesn’t belong and should be moved to the place it does belong. Sounds pretty simple to me.

Province Must Step In To End City Hall Rot

Instead we get a promise from management that they will respond to this misallocation in a report to be brought to council in Q4 of 2025. What I read from the response is that the report will deal with future allocations of these funds – where is the part saying that the past erroneous allocations will be immediately corrected and allocated to the appropriate fund?

Earlier in her report, the AG says:

“Additionally, management indicated a decision was made when the Road Safety Action Plan was developed in 2019 to allocate red light camera revenue (estimated at $3M annually) to the Ottawa Police Service to help close a funding gap.”

So in 2019, a sum of $3 million annually was to be gifted to the OPS to deal with a “funding gap”. What was the source of this “funding gap” and does it have anything to do with road safety? Is this a time-limited donation of $3 million or just an unaccountable and ongoing gift to the police? What is the police service using that $3 million for?

My suspicion is that the intention of management is to shuffle this down the road to the October-December Q4 of 2025 with the hope it will be forgotten by then. In addition, including it in the 2025 road safety report or the 2026 budget will lump the funds in with other issues and, I would expect, mix them in with other revenue reporting as well as recommendations for the upcoming year.

Colour me surprised if those 2026 recommendations or budget proposals have anywhere in them the restoration of the current shortfall to the Road Safety Reserve Fund. In addition, I expect that the recommendations to council at that time will be to continue diverting the funds to the city’s operating funds and to the police with the justification that the city is in a precarious financial state and can’t afford to be sending money off to reserve funds that could be paying the city’s bills.

Senior management at the city must be over the moon with the AG’s recommendation that they should revisit the allocation of these funds and report to council on where the money should go. Not often the AG hands you a golden opportunity to ignore a council directive and bring forward a way to subvert it permanently.

Score: AG 0; Senior Management 1.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.