Greater Sudbury city council kicked off 2026 budget deliberations this morning by unanimously or near-unanimously approving all partner agencies budgets in rapid succession.
These budgets most notably include Greater Sudbury Police Service’s 10.21-per-cent hike, as unanimously approved by the police board and presented to city council last month.
Budget deliberations also saw city council by nearly unanimous in approving the 2026 budgets for Public Health Sudbury and Districts, Conservation Sudbury and Greater Sudbury Public Library. (Editor's note: Since publication of this story, Ward 2 Coun. Eric Benoit contacted Sudbury.com to clarify that he says he did not vote for the budget, so we've amended this sentence to say "nearly unanimous" as opposed to "unanimous" which is how it appeared yesterday.)
Their respective budget increases were also presented to city council members last month, coming in at much lower increases than GSPS to keep their organizations rolling along at what was described as a largely status-quo level.
“It’s really just a maintenance budget,” Conservation Sudbury general manager Carl Jorgensen told city council members.
Although these organizations’ budget requests were approved quickly without discussion on Tuesday, lengthy discussions took place at past meetings and questions were submitted by city council members and posted online.
Key to the police budget are six newly funded positions between 2026 and 2027.
While the number of sworn members will remain at 308, the number of “police professionals” will grow by six to reach 154 by 2027. These include a human resources staff member, four special constables to work the front desk and an information technology staff member whose provincial funding has run dry.
Going into Tuesday’s budget deliberations, the city’s tentative 2026 tax levy increase was 5.3 per cent, of which roughly half is attributable to its partner agencies.
Using a residential property with an assessed value of $230,000 as an example (close to the median in Greater Sudbury, with assessed value a different thing than market value), a property owner would be expected to pay an additional $205 in 2026 as a result of the 5.3-per-cent hike.
Of this, $104 is attributable to the municipality, $89 is due to the GSPS hike and $12 is from the other partner agencies.
As anticipated due to a prior city council agreement in June, the city’s elected officials also approved a 4.8-per-cent water/wastewater increase for 2026 this morning.
Soon after approving these parts of the 2026 budget, the city’s elected officials began delving into a series of business cases, which each affect service levels and potentially stray from the tentative 5.3-per-cent levy hike (those with a neutral impact were quickly approved in several cases).
Sudbury.com will remain in attendance, with in-depth follow-up reports to be published soon.
Previously estimated at a 5.2-per-cent tax levy hike for 2026, new context added in recent days bumped it up to its current 5.3 per cent. This context included such things as an assessment growth of 0.8 per cent in 2025 instead of the one-per-cent which was baked into the base budget, resulting in a $750,000 reduction in projected tax revenue.
Although the city was slated to debate and approve operational budgets for both 2026 and 2027 and review the remaining two years of the city’s four-year capital budget this week, a successful motion by Ward 4 Coun. Pauline Fortin saw them cut the 2027 operational budget from discussions.
With a newly hired CAO (Shari Lichterman) eager to dig deeper into municipal operations and a municipal election slated for Oct. 26, 2026, she argued that there’d be little sense in approving the city’s 2027 budget so early.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.