The powers that be in Winnipeg have pushed for cheap property taxes for decades. As a result, the city doesn’t have enough money to balance the books, let alone maintain infrastructure, deliver services and respond to challenges like homelessness and the toxic drug crisis.

Winnipeg’s fiscal problem stems from decades of keeping property-tax increases below inflation and relying on inadequate revenues to fund a growing city. The result? Today, Winnipeg spends less money per person on city services than it did in 2001.

A look at the books at city hall is stark. Winnipeg has run a deficit almost every year since the COVID-19 pandemic because of climate-change-driven heavy ice and snowstorms, higher fuel costs and increased policing overtime. During this time, city council tried to cut and freeze public service spending where it could; as a result, community services have been cut to the bone.

Departments responsible for what makes a city a good place to live have been squeezed. Since 1999, community services — responsible for libraries, recreation, swimming lessons and aspects of Winnipeg’s poverty-reduction work — has 149 fewer staff positions, an 18 per cent reduction, even as the city’s population has grown 35 per cent, or by 220,000 people.

Winnipeg takes a reputational beating sometimes and some of the criticism is deserved.

Concerns about public safety are real. Homelessness remains painfully visible. Too many people are struggling with addiction, poverty, mental illness and inadequate housing in plain sight.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But a city can be making measurable progress, struggling badly in other areas and still be reduced unfairly to its worst headlines. Winnipeg deserves neither denial nor caricature.

Take public safety.

There are good arguments for putting Winnipeg’s water and sewer rates under the control of Manitoba’s Public Utilities Board.

The strongest is that residents shouldn’t have to rely entirely on city politicians to decide how much they pay for an essential service they have no choice but to use.

But there’s another important reason to support PUB oversight: it would force an independent regulator to look at both sides of the equation.

It would have to consider what ratepayers can afford, but also what the utility needs to remain financially and operationally healthy.