City of Regina and RPL looking to find solution for renewal project as city faces debt challenges

Regina city council weighs the city’s financial future as rising bus fares, debt, and funding for landmarks spark debate. Damian Smith reports.

The City of Regina is figuring out how to distribute its debt.

At Wednesday’s city council meeting, Mayor Chad Bachynski said as the city grows faster than anticipated, it only has enough debt room to service either the wastewater treatment plant, or the renewal of the Regina Public Library’s (RPL) central location.

“This is something that I think was indicated today through the timeline that this is something that was probably lingering for us for some time now,” he said.

In July 2024, the previous city council approved borrowing for the library project, but the RPL says communication has been disappointing ever since.

“We found out purely by accident that the city admin was saying that there was not enough debt financing available for both projects,” said Marj Gavigan, the board chair of the RPL.

“Obviously we expressed some concern about that at the time and, city council referred it to the city admin to come up with some options on how we could finance both projects.”

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The RPL says it completed a request for qualification, and was about to hit the next stage, but found out that the renewal was not on the approved capital projects list.

“When the report came out, and we attended the committee meeting, a couple of weeks ago looking at the report, it was obviously not what we expected,” said Gavigan.

“The only way we’re going to get out of this is by the revenue generation that we can do as a municipality and help from other levels of government to catch up on some of that critical infrastructure, which is what we’ve been really pushing for in the last while,” Bachynski said.

While no decision has been made, Bachynski, who is on the library board himself, along with other councillors, says that communication needs to be more forthcoming.

“There’s some lessons learned in terms of how we communicate that type of information,” Bachynski said. “We know we have a very large infrastructure deficit that we need to catch up on. I think what we got too, was to take our lessons learned and move forward.”

Administration will gather more information and report later on possible alternative solutions.