Author: Casey Vander Ploeg
In Spring 2006, the City of Edmonton’s department of Corporate Business Planning (Office of Infrastructure and Funding Strategy) invited the Canada West Foundation to prepare a paper on alternative funding mechanisms for infrastructure, paying particular attention to the unique challenges confronting the City of Edmonton. The result is Delivering the Goods: Infrastructure and Alternative Revenue Sources for the City of Edmonton, which was originally intended to provide part of the research base for the City’s emerging Sustainable Infrastructure Financial Strategy (SIFS). Work under the strategy comprised six distinct phases:
Phase 1: Assessing existing municipal plans and strategies, and integrating them into a larger and longer-term strategy.
Phase 2: Identifying the future funding needs for new and existing infrastructure.
Phase 3: Assessing current sources of infrastructure funding, highlighting best practices in infrastructure financing, funding, and delivery, and identifying alternative revenue sources.
Phase 4: Assessing the effectiveness of various options via an investment model.
Phase 5: Evaluating the various options and identifying the most effective alternatives.
Phase 6: Developing an implementation plan for the final recommendations.
OBJECTIVES OF THE PAPER
The Canada West Foundation has designed this discussion paper with three overarching objectives in mind:
First, the paper discusses the reported infrastructure funding gap facing the City of Edmonton.
Second, the paper presents a detailed profile of the current funding sources used by the City, and assesses the capacity of these sources to meet the infrastructure challenge.
Third, the paper discusses emerging best practice in infrastructure provision, and presents a “top-ten” list of financing and funding alternatives to better meet the City of Edmonton’s infrastructure needs.