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Saskatoon City administration is attributing a $21.6 million funding blunder to human error, a rushed timeline to arrange a complicated financial agreement and staffing absences.
City councillors and committee members learned more about a multi-million-dollar mistake by city administration at the monthly environment, utilities and corporate services meeting on Tuesday.
“This is a significant error, no question,” stated city manager Jeff Jorgenson at the meeting.
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The mistake was caught by city administration nine months after it approved funding for the city to expand the size of the pipelines installed along Wanuskewin Road over the last several months in the biosolids pipeline corridor project.
“At the point that the error was made, that resulted in an overstatement by the administration of the funding that was available in the reserve for all projects in the utility,” explained city manager, Jeff Jorgenson, to the committee during its Nov. 3 meeting.
“It was an over-optimistic estimate of the money available in the reserve.”
Despite the error, Jorgenson and the city’s chief financial officer, Clae Hack, told the committee there will be no negative impact to city utilities or property taxes and ratepayers will see no changes.
“But there was a period of time when we misunderstood, or errantly believed, that there was that money available to allocate,” Jorgenson explained.
Jorgenson said the $21.3 million was “never there to be used or to be allocated” because it had already been allocated to projects.
“We’re correcting that error and we are accurately stating the money that’s available,” Jorgenson said.
“There’s no negative impact, but the consequence is … for that point in time, we thought that there was that money available to reallocate. The control caught it; it isn’t.”
He said that as soon as the mistake was found out, administration came forward to publicly share the correction.
Though the error was substantial, Jorgenson noted that it came “from a team that is extremely high performance and has a tremendous track record.
“I understand the extremely rare series of events that took place for this to happen. It was a combination of the most, as Mr. Hack said, the most complicated financial arrangement we have. A key individual being away — I would say unexpectedly — at that moment, (and) an incredible rush because we had a contractor ready to order materials for the project.”
“We had tremendous pressure and had come to this point where we had almost no time to turn this around, and so it happened,” Jorgenson stated.
He said there is also regret that certain controls were not in place to avoid the mistake. Now, he said Hack and his team have looked into other city projects to ensure there have been no other, similar errors and are putting a better control system in place.
City of Saskatoon chief financial officer Clae Hack speaks at City Hall on Nov. 3, 2026. (Libby Gray/650 CKOM)
City taking steps to prevent future errors
Responding to a question from Mayor Cynthia Block asking how administration can guarantee such a situation never again happens, Hack said informal changes are already happening in terms of review steps when it comes to government funding.
The vast majority of capital funding and associated funding by the city is “very straightforward,” Hack told the committee on Tuesday, adding “the risk of this issue happening with 99 per cent of our projects, I would say, is very low.”
In terms of official procedure, Hack said a draft is being finished to be run through internal channels for approval.
“They’re all completed or in process of being completed here in the next couple weeks,” Hack explained, adding that key ones have already been implemented.
Hack said the new controls will rectify an overreliance on institutional knowledge and staff experience with better processes and more documentation so that “when people look at the system, they can understand the government funding reallocation that’s occurred without having to flag it in their own mind and then go to an accompanying spreadsheet to understand all the ticks and bobs that have happened over the last five years.”
The recommendations put to the committee on Tuesday, said Hack, rectified the original decision from January of this year for the project and is the same recommendation administration would have made at the time, had it not thought another funding source was readily available.
He added that completing the project now will save the city “tens of millions of dollars” in development charges over the course of several decades.
The committee unanimously carried the three recommendations from administration to amend the budget, as well as a motion by Ward 1 Councillor Kathryn MacDonald for administration to provide certain information on the budget adjustment to city council during its November meeting.
— with files from 650 CKOM’s Lara Fominoff
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