REGINA – Residents of Regina will have to dig deep into their wallets in 2026 after council passed a 10.9 per cent mill rate increase this week.
Council passed the 2026 budget on Friday afternoon, one which also included a 7.82 per cent Utility rate increase. For the average household the mill rate marks a $23 increase, while the utility increase equates to $14 a month. The increases take effect in June.
While the mill rate is down from the 15.69 originally proposed by administration, city officials indicated they believed it to be the largest mill rate increase in the city’s history.
“You know, we can’t kid ourselves anymore,” said Mayor Chad Bachynski to reporters.
“We’re not in a position to artificially keep mill rate increases low for popularity. We need to take the math seriously if we don’t want to put our city in jeopardy of truly cutting the services that residents expect.”
Bachynski acknowledged that the size of the increase was not something that was expected.
“I don’t think anybody was expecting that given the history of what we’ve seen. I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t think anybody in the city was expecting that,” Bachynski said.
“But given the realities of inflation and the pressures on the city, again, it’s the math. We have to go by the math and if we don’t, then we’re gonna put ourselves in a worse spot moving forward.”
As for what drove the cost pressures on the city Bachynski said there “wasn’t one item.”
“I mean, you know, looking through the documentation, you can see that every area, and in fact, going through each area, you know, I can say confidently, city administration absolutely is, is operating with less people today than they have in the last decade. And so there’s not one area, it’s a combination of inflationary costs, it’s a combination of labour increases, material increases, it’s — it’s across the board.”
He said the municipality is not immune to the same factors that every business is affected by.
“And so we’re in the same spot, and that is a reaction to that… and I’ve said it before, we’ve seen artificially low middle rate increases over the last decade. You take a half a percent off of those past 10 years, not even accounting for inflation, you drop what we’re at today by five per cent. So, just some perspective.”
Council’s support for various portions of the budget was far from unanimous, with the operations portion only getting through by a 6-5 vote. There were some contentious decisions including on a 10 per cent transit fare hike — with the bylaw coming back again in the new year — as well as higher fees to park downtown and increases to parking ticket fines.
“At the end of the day, there were no easy decisions for Council to go through. Every cut that we make is going to impact somebody,” said Bachynski.
“You know, it was a balance between looking at, you know, service cuts, fare increases, something to try and find a balance between what the cost of service is and what the service delivery looks like for residents.”
One of the issues discussed during budget deliberations was the sorry state of the city reserves. The mayor noted that there was “strong recognition that the city’s reserves need to be rebuilt,” and that some reserves are at levels that are not sustainable.
He also noted that residents expressed during budget deliberations that reducing or cutting essential programs and services like transit, outdoor rinks, or community investment grants would have real consequences. He said people emphasized the importance of recreation, culture, and community spaces.
For the future, Bachynski told reporters he wanted to see the city get to a state where “we have longer-term predictable increases that are closely tied to inflation, and where we have reserves in a healthy spot to supplement that in a very transparent way to ensure that we don’t deplete them to the point that we are today.
Of the reserves situation, Bachynski said he felt “better with the decision we made this week. But we’re not, no, we’re not out of the next, we’re not out of the woods yet. So there’s, there’s a lot of time to pass yet to make sure that we actually build those back up, and we need some, you know, things to go our way and not have catastrophic failure in our infrastructure in the meantime. So we’re not, we’re not out of the woods, but it’s a step in the right direction.”
