Photo credit: EverythingGP staff.

By Curtis Galbraith

City Hall

City Hall to look into how Grande Prairie does financially compared to other cities

May 23, 2025 | 6:00 AM

One member of city council wants to see how Grande Prairie is doing financially compared to other Alberta cities.

At Tuesday’s meeting, council approved a motion put forward by Councillor Dylan Bressey to have administration put together a report.

Bressey says for him, a comparison to other cities is “one of the best measures” of the city’s financial performance.

“If our costs are out of line with what other cities are seeing, then we’ve got issues we need to look at to see if we can find efficiencies.”

“If our costs are below what other municipalities are spending, then maybe there are areas of service we should enhance, or maybe that just means we are doing a really great job delivering services efficiently.”

Bressey says the biggest factor he looks at is how much the city spends per resident to deliver services.

“And every time we look at that, we see that the City of Grande Prairie spends about what other Alberta cities spend per resident to plow the roads, have a fire department, maintain awesome parks, and we do that despite having increased costs just by virtue of being north and doing a lot of services, a lot higher level of service, than other municipalities do.”

Bressey says it looks like Grande Prairie is doing a good job when compared to other cities, but he wants to keep rechecking those numbers.

The city’s quarterly financial report says city hall is on track to run an $822,000 surplus this year.

Bressey says the surplus in any year is a small percentage of the city’s total budget.

“The best way to compare how we are doing as a municipality is are we spending about what other cities spend to deliver their services.”

“It’s hard to compare when you’ve got houses that are worth different amounts, when you’ve got business properties that are worth different amounts, it’s hard to directly compare how we’re doing in terms of taxes, but we can easily compare how much we spend per resident compared to other cities.”

The projected surplus for this year is 0.38 per cent of the city’s total budget of $215 million.