City Hall Corner

Updates from Councillor Hill on City Hall meetings and policy

May 2, 2025

The big show at council this week was Tuesday’s Audit Committee. There was a lot of press generated about the Red Light and Speed Camera audit, and it’s very understandable why. One of the promises of the automated enforcement cameras is that the ticket you pay for running a red or speeding in a community safety zone will go directly into improving road safety – and not inflating the City’s budget.

That being said, the auditor’s report was not well represented in the media prior to committee. A lot of the confusion around the audit report stemmed from the difference between the speed camera program and the red light program. In 2019, council introduced speed cameras, and then tied all future revenue of those cameras to the Road Safety Action Plan – a project designed to improve our roads in order to make it harder to drive dangerously. At the same time, council tasked staff with ensuring that funds going to the Road Safety Action Plan (through the road safety reserve fund) did not come at the expense of tax revenue. While speed cameras where a new program to the City, red light cameras where not. The first red light camera was introduced in the early 2000s, and by the time the Road Safety Action Plan had been introduced the city already had dozens of red lights installed, with the revenue from those cameras going into general funds. 

If the revenue from those pre-existing red light cameras had gone into the road safety reserve fund, then staff would be forced to make up the lost revenue in the general coffers through tax increases, which is obviously a non-starter. So the compromise introduced at the time was to ensure any revenue generated above the average of revenue generated by the pre-existing red light cameras of $11.75 million should go towards the Road Safety Action plan. However with COVID, and better road behaviour revenue from the combined new and old red light cameras never came above the old benchmark.

So, where do staff and the auditor disagree? The Auditor General argues that from a fairness perspective, the revenue generated by a new camera should go towards the Road Safety Action Fund, and the revenue generated by an old camera should go towards general revenue. This is a more complicated and labour intensive way to track those funds, but it would be a more rigorous approach, and it is something staff has agreed to now implement.  

Finally, let’s get into the dollars and cents of it all. From 2020 to 2025, the Auditor General found that $10.7 million that could have gone to the road safety reserve fund instead went to general funds. Staff confirmed at Audit Committee that the City has spent over double that amount, over $20 million, on road safety projects from general revenue, in addition to spending earmarked from the road safety reserve fund. At the end of the day, road safety projects received the funding they needed.

You can watch the full debate, here.

Looking Ahead

Next week Finance and Corporate Services and Planning and Housing committees will be meeting. You can read the Finance agenda here and the Planning and Housing agenda here.