As city hall aims to hold next year’s tax increase to 0%, Calgary’s new city council will have tough decisions to make this week.

City administration is recommending a variety of cuts across all departments as part of the adjusted 2018 budget—including 156 full-time jobs and $33M in service reductions.

As city councillors head into this week’s budget deliberations, they’re feeling the weight of the task ahead.

“A lot of people will say we need to cut the fat at city hall,” said Ward 3 councillor Jyoti Gondek. “A lot of times that means cutting people’s livelihood. And in this economy, if you cut someone’s job and it throws their family into a downward spiral — that’s on me.”

Gondek says council needs to make cuts where they’ll have the least human impact, rather than sweeping job cuts.

“We need to be careful that we are looking at people’s lives at the same time we are looking at the dollars.”

Originally the city was looking at a $170M gap between revenues and spending for 2018, due in large part to the economic downturn, but the gap is down to $146M.

The looming cuts come at an awkward time, as Calgary has been flaunting the city’s livability to woo talent and companies such as Amazon. The proposed cuts will affect the very things that make Calgary livable, such as transit and parks.

The hope is that the cuts won’t be too deep.

“I don’t think anything that’s being proposed as a cut at this stage was done lightly,” said Gondek.

Councillor Druh Farrell says she’s concerned by the proposed reduction to parks. “Some parks in very busy urban cities are treated almost like outdoor recreation centres,” she said. “They have full time staff to ensure they’re well maintained and safe and programmed. That’s what builds a vibrant city.”

“We have so few parks in our inner city. We can’t afford to lose in an extremely lean parks budget. And the benefit to the tax bottom line is so minimal as to be nonexistent.”

City police, meanwhile, will be seeking a $14.3M budget increase this week.

This week’s deliberations will be the first big test of the new council, which has already seen unlikely alliances—such as when Farrell and Jeromy Farkas, who are night and day politically, voted together against allocating $2-million to continue exploring an Olympic bid for Calgary.

“We’re all hands on deck,” said Farkas. “I think there’s a big understanding that the task ahead of us is bigger than any sort of grudges or disagreements we may have had in the past.”