calgarylens
live recordtreaty 7 / mohkínstsis

Every figure here is priced per land-use amendment or per approved development permit — that is, per application Council heard, the unit of red tape. It is not a cost per home: a single application can carry several dwellings (a rowhouse holds a few), so the cost per home is lower still. This is the council-table time that citywide rezoning let most infill skip entirely.

[01]

What it costs, and what it buys, by month

The cost/benefit, month by month: the barsare the amendments Council heard that month split by outcome — approved, defeated, or still pending — and the line is the fully-loaded council-time cost (a floor). The benefit side is lopsided: of the amendments that reached a decision, 98% were approved (1,576 approved vs 34 defeated), so almost all of the spend goes to amendments that pass. Across the window that works out to ≈ $634 of council time per approved amendment.

Outcome is each amendment’s council disposition; approved + defeated + pending reconciles to the month’s amendment count (pending = no decision on record yet — recent items, plus a few older ones the parsed minutes don’t resolve). Cost is a floor: loaded council compensation (base + benefits + transition) plus chamber support staff, but nofacility/admin overhead or lifecycle cost, and only amendments with a measured council duration — 94% of amendments in 2018-06 – 2026-05, so the cost-per-approved figure is a floor too. The 7,143amendments outside the high-coverage window are excluded, not silently dropped. Rate & method travel in the file’s rate_table.
[02]

Council time per approved development permit, by year

For the amendments that produced an approved development permit — the matched cohort — the council-deliberation cost divided by those approved permits. Numerator and denominator are the same population, so the ratio is honest: it is council time per permit that actually followed, not per application. A permit is still one application, though — it can cover several homes — so this is cost per approved permit, not per dwelling.

Matched cohort over 2018-06 – 2026-05: 951 approved permits, $640,712 of council time, ≈ $674per permit. A modelled estimate and a floor — only priced council durations count.
[02b]

Council time per approved permit, by council term and district

The same matched cohort, regrouped — by the council term that heard each amendment, and by whether the proposed district was R-CG (the district at the centre of citywide rezoning) or any other. Same per-second rates as above; only the grouping changes. The pattern is consistent: R-CG amendments cost less council time per permit than other rezonings, and that gap widened as R-CG hearings became routine.

Matched cohort over 2018-06 – 2026-05, split by term and proposed district. R-CG and other reconcile to the term’s combined cohort (same rates, rate_table). A land-use amendment counts as R-CG if R-CG is among its proposed district(s); multi-parcel applications carry a compound district string, split on “;” and “/”. The in-progress final term is dimmed — its cohort is still thin (see each bar’s approved count in the tooltip), surfaced rather than read as a finished comparison.
[02c]

Council time per rejected application, by year

The flip side of the cost/benefit: a rejected application produces no rezoning, yet it costs the mostcouncil time. Rejected amendments are the contested ones, so they run far longer at the table — a median $905 of council time each, about 2.8× the $318 a typical approved amendment takes. Across the window, ≈ $40,226 of council time went to the 31 priced applications Council ultimately turned down.

Each bar is a year’s average council-time cost per rejected application (rate × measured deliberation seconds, ÷ the year’s rejected count), over 2018-06 – 2026-05. Rejections are rare, so the cohorts are thin — each bar’s count is in its tooltip, and a single contested case can swing a year. A floor and a modelled estimate — only the 31 rejected applications with a measured duration are priced. Council-table cost only; it excludes the planning, legal, and administrative work a refused application also consumes.
[02d]

What's inside the number

The $674 per permit is fully-loaded compensation, split across four primary-verified components. Elected base salary is the bulk; benefits and the transition accrual load it further; chamber support staff is the one component resting on a stated headcount assumption. Building overhead is not here— it is an allocation method, not a measured cost, so it is excluded on purpose.

  • Elected base salary63.3% · $405,798
  • Elected benefits9% · $57,598
  • Elected transition accrual2.4% · $15,608
  • Chamber support-staff time25.2% · $161,708
Shares of the window-wide matched-cohort total ($640,712); the four sum to the headline. Excluded by design: facility/admin overhead, planning-admin, City Solicitor file work, CPC honoraria, and application/permit fees. Component rates travel in the file’s rate_table.
[03]

Council minutes per amendment, by council term

How long a single amendment takes at the council table — and how that shifts from one council to the next. A single all-time median hides the swing, so this splits the same amendments by the council term that heard them. Each term’s median is short, but a long tail of contested amendments runs far longer.

Median (dot) with the inter-quartile range (p25–p75, whiskers) over amendments with a measured council duration in 2018-06 – 2026-05, split by the council term that heard them. The terms partition the same cohort (their counts sum to the 1,576 total); the in-progress final term is dimmed.

This is one slice of the rezoning story. see alsowhat citywide rezoning did to supply leads the section.

verification
modelled estimate
derivation
Fully-loaded compensation cost of the people in the chamber while land-use amendments are deliberated. Every per-second rate is computed here, not ingested, and sums four components: (1) the 14 councillors + mayor BASE salary (Councillor-Duties schedule, by hearing year); (2) their BENEFITS (AFR 2024 Note 32 actuals — councillor $17,846 = $232k ÷ 13 full-year incumbents, mayor $9,000); (3) their TRANSITION accrual (2/52 of base = two weeks pay per year of service); and (4) the chamber SUPPORT-STAFF roster, fully benefit-loaded from the CDL 2025 salary ranges + benefit-plan schedule (LAPP/MEBAC/life). Each component is divided by 2,080 FTE hours/year ÷ 3,600 and multiplied by the amendment's measured council deliberation seconds; the monthly series aggregates by hearing month, the per-permit figure over the matched cohort (numerator and denominator share one population). STILL A FLOOR relative to the full cost of rezoning: it EXCLUDES facility/admin overhead (an allocation method, not a primary fact) and the rest of the lifecycle (planning-admin, City Solicitor file work, CPC honoraria, application/permit fees). ONE STATED MODELLING ASSUMPTION: the support-staff roster + headcount present at a hearing is an allocation choice — its salaries are primary-verified, its attribution is not.
sources