Traffic Cameras: City Council Just Lost: BENN

Published 04/26/2025 · Updated 04/26/2025

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What don’t you know but should? A key question for every manager.

Recently, the city’s auditor general released a report that showed staff has not been allocating the revenues from the automated red-light cameras to a road-safety reserve account, which is contrary to a resolution passed by council in 2019. Somerset Ward Councillor Ariel Troster was not amused, referring to it as a “bait-and-switch.”

This brings to mind three key questions.

How did this happen?

According to the AG report, staff interpreted the council resolution to be limited to transferring the revenues above a baseline of 2019 revenues, which were about $11.5 million. Since 2020 revenues in excess of $41 million have not been allocated to the road-safety reserve fund. Rather staff continued to allocate the funds to the operating budget, including a $3-million-per-year allocation to the police services operating budget.

Let’s parse this explanation. Staff interpreted. Rather than seek a clarification, staff interpreted. If the council resolution, after one gets past the archaic litany of ‘whereases’ was so poorly worded as to create this level of confusion, why didn’t staff seek a clarification? To ensure that they were acting according to the will of council. Or did they? Perhaps former city manager Steve Kanellakos could shed some light on that. Or former Mayor Jim Watson. I ask because it most certainly fits the pattern of disgraceful behaviour that the provincial LRT judicial inquiry found both individuals guilty of for not providing council with information required to make informed decisions.

TRAFFIC CAMERAS: A Big Win For City Staff

It is vital to keep in mind that for more than a decade, staff has struggled to provide a properly balanced budget. Staff regularly used the accounting leger-du-main technique of transferring funds from various reserve accounts to the operating budget. In fairness to staff, they were acting on the instructions of Watson to keep property-tax rate increases at a prescribed rate, while not materially reducing service levels. This behaviour pattern has continued under current Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s administration … except for the current year. This year council passed a budget with a $36-million plug in it. Why? Because the accumulated effect of the previous decade or so of raiding the various operating reserves had left those accounts effectively empty.

How did council not know what they should have known?

The answer to this has two parts.

First, staff chose not to provide meaningful reports to council. Note the word ‘chose’. Staff could provide meaningful reports but chose not to. One of the roles of management is to provide senior levels, up to the board or council level with reports. These reports demonstrate whether council level directives have been complied with – or not.

Second, council as a whole lacks the understanding of the importance of getting reports that provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions. The responsibility lies with council to identify gaps in the reports that they receive.

How can this be corrected?

There is a basic business concept that management needs to receive complete, accurate reports, on a timely basis, in a format designed to make decisions. How basic? First lecture of my first university accounting course.

A simple four-row continuity report of the road-safety reserve account, a business reporting fundamental that I learned more than four decades ago, would have highlighted to council that the red-light camera revenues were not being allocated to the road-safety reserve.

Those rows would be:

Opening balance of the account;
Add the amounts transferred in (red-light camera revenues);
Deduct the amounts transferred out (used for road safety);
Equals the closing balance of the account.

That the amounts transferred in were nil would be a red light. One that not even council should drive through.

This type of report should have been issued at least once a year, preferably once a quarter. Anyone in management with basic accounting experience could have prepared this report. That includes the previous city treasurer and now current city manager, Wendy Stephanson. As a starting point, Somerset Councillor Ariel Troster might want to ask Stephanson why she chose not provide this type of report to council.

Which takes us to the bigger problem. Councillors don’t know what they don’t know, and they aren’t the least bit concerned about that.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.