Stop! Budget time! Let’s break it down

You’re reading the November 14, 2025 edition of the Peterborough Currents email newsletter. To receive our email newsletters straight to your inbox, sign up here.

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Hi, I’m Peterborough Currents co-editor David Tough. Welcome to your weekly email newsletter!

This week my co-editor Gabe Pollock has an in-depth article exploring the phenomenon of the ever-expanding police budget. It is the product of several weeks’ research, and an example of the kind of thoughtful and informed local journalism that only reader-supported, non-profit media like Peterborough Currents can produce. 

Also, this week I went through the City of Peterborough’s draft budget and flagged some things that are concerning, and some things are just interesting. 

Let’s check it out.  

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The Peterborough police budget has grown almost 50 per cent in four years. Does that make sense?

by Gabe Pollock

This year, the Peterborough Police Service are requesting an extra $3.5 million for their operating budget, a 9.22 per cent increase over last year. This is a major chunk of where municipal tax dollars go, and it’s also the fourth year in a row with significant increases to the police budget… but why?

Peterborough Currents is asking, what goes into a police budget? This is a large and complex organization, responding to pressures from citizens and all levels of government, constrained by complex legal strictures, and and reacting to a city with a growing population and evolving needs.

And in a broader sense, do growing police budgets actually make us safer? How do we evaluate the “success” of a police budget? Are the police the best way to respond to the social crises of our time, or are there alternate methods we should explore?

Check out our in-depth exploration.

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Stop! Budget time! Let’s break it down

by David Tough

The City of Peterborough released its draft 2026 budget earlier this month, and held public meetings on its merits. There is an extensive two-day discussion at City Council next week, November 17 and 18 before it gets approved in early December. We at Peterborough Currents have taken a look at the budget to get a sense of what’s in it. 

Let’s take a look at some of the big items first.  

The budget proposes an increase in bus fare of $0.25, from $3.25 to $3.50. Public transit in Peterborough is residualist, meaning it’s only intended to be used as a last resort for the small number of people who can’t drive. This makes it easier to make changes that might inconvenience users, like raising fees or cutting services, as people who depend on public transit don’t have a big voice in government.

The budget also shows that the residential portion of the City’s property tax continues to outpace business property tax revenues. While Mayor Jeff Leal has said in the past that he hoped to increase revenue from commercial property taxes, the gap is actually growing wider. The growth numbers are small – 0.4 per cent versus 0.2 per cent – but given that residential tax revenue is already seven times commercial, it’s a worrying trend. 

Municipalities are constitutionally constrained to a very limited repertoire of taxation; as they absorb responsibilities from other levels of government (that can tax incomes at source, directly from people’s paycheques, for example), municipalities have to rely on taxes that are levied and paid directly, in highly visible ways. 

Here are some other interesting details in the budget.

• There are 450 kilometres of sidewalk in Peterborough, and every year around 3,800 linear metres (1 per cent of the total) is rebuilt. The City is buying three new sidewalk plows which, in addition to the nine it currently owns, will bring the total fleet to 12. The snowplows are a necessary response to climate change, with its recurrent winter freezing and thawing cycles that make sidewalks harder to keep clear.
  
• The company that made the tiny train at Riverview Park and Zoo went out of business … in 1978! The City, which took over ownership of the zoo from Peterborough Utilities in April of 2025, needs to replace the little locomotive. The zoo is revenue-neutral, its costs covered by utilities revenues; fundraising for a new train has netted more than $300,000 so far, but no manufacturer has been found.
  
• A total of 4,000 new trees have been or will be planted in Peterborough over the course of 2025 and 2026. The trees are large, with a height of over 3 metres and a diameter of 5 centimetres, and have been chosen for optimal thriving by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM)’s Growing Canada’s Community Canopy (GCCC) program. With matching GCCC funds, the City is spending nearly $2 million on the program.

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