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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 1, 2026
CITY OF NANAIMO DISCOVERS TAXPAYERS
Mayor Krog Announces “The Taxpayer Relief Bylaw” in Startling Break from Normal Practice
NANAIMO — In what experts are already calling the least believable municipal announcement in modern local history, Mayor Leonard Krog announced today that Nanaimo City Council, during a special in-camera meeting, unanimously passed the “The Taxpayer Relief Bylaw.”
The bylaw marks a dramatic departure from City Hall’s long-standing governing philosophy of spend first, justify later, and bill the taxpayer forever. Expanding costs are generally treated as inevitable, resistance is treated as misunderstanding, and the taxpayer is treated as a funding mechanism rather than a constituency.
Under the new policy, council has reportedly agreed to the following emergency measures:
No property tax increases for the next five years, while City Hall attempts the revolutionary exercise of living within the means of the people it keeps shaking down. Allowing City Hall an opportunity to attempt the budgeting discipline routinely required of households, seniors, renters, and small businesses.
All CUPE and IAFF wages will be rolled back to 2022 levels, reflecting the financial reality of the taxpayers who don’t enjoy guaranteed raises, gold-plated leverage, or the ability to send the bill to someone else. The same restraint will apply to all exempt and admin staff.
Mayor Krog and council will roll back councillors’ pay to pre-2018 levels, in recognition of the forgotten idea that council was supposed to be public service, not a taxpayer-funded lifestyle upgrade or pension supplement.
All “nice-to-have” projects will be suspended immediately, pending evidence that core services, affordability, and public order have first been adequately addressed.
The proposed $3-million washroom at Maffeo Sutton Park will be replaced with a practical $250,000 facility, based on the outdated concept that a public toilet is supposed to serve a function, not stand as a monument to municipal excess as a cvivic vanity project.
The $90-million Works Yard project will be shelved and replaced with a “what is needed, not wanted” $5-million renovation, capped at $5 million and delivered by design-build procurement, thereby reducing the City’s exposure to inflated ambition, consultant drift, and staff fantasy planning.
All consultant contracts over $50,000 will be frozen, until such time as staff are able to explain why internal capacity is perpetually insufficient and why external validation is so frequently required for internally generated ideas.
Any future tax increase above inflation will require councillors to publicly explain, in plain English, why City Hall is incapable of doing what every household in Nanaimo has been forced to do for years: cut back.
City officials have stated that the measures are intended to restore public confidence, though no timeline has been provided for when taxpayers may reasonably expect that confidence to be warranted.
A spokesperson familiar with the matter noted that the bylaw arose from growing public concern over a pattern in which payroll expansion, project inflation, consultant dependency, and discretionary spending are treated as normal, while taxpayer frustration is treated as a communications problem.
Council also considered, but did not formally adopt, several related accountability measures, including:
a requirement that every major project begin with the question, “Who asked for this?”
a rule requiring staff to distinguish between essential spending, preferred spending, and spending that becomes urgent only after it has already been promised
a policy preventing the phrase “investment in the community” from being used as a substitute for cost control
These additional measures were reportedly set aside after concerns were raised that they could interfere with long-standing municipal planning traditions.
Mayor Krog is understood to have supported the bylaw unanimously, though staff have not confirmed whether the decision reflects a lasting policy shift or a short-lived administrative event associated with the calendar date.
Residents are advised that the announcement was issued on April 1, which continues to be the most plausible date on which Nanaimo taxpayers might hear City Hall acknowledge that public money is not free money, that restraint is not extremism, and that “affordability” applies to governments too.
Media Contact:
Office of Unintentional Honesty
City of Nanaimo
April 1 Communications Unit
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