Well, today we start another week in the weird and wild land of Oz known as Edmonton.

For the life of me, I cannot understand what’s going on here. It makes little or no sense. Can you follow the logic of how the city chooses to do business and how it decides it will spend your tax dollars? If you can, I would really be interested in hearing your explanation. But for the moment, I am stuck with the apparent contradictions that seem to confront us daily.

Last week, the city administration presented the proposed 2012 operating budget. Apparently, we are supposed to be overjoyed that there will be a three per cent tax increase and an additional two per cent to continue the Neighbourhood Renewal Funding Program.

I guess we are not supposed to ask why neighbourhood renewal isn’t just part of what we pay taxes for. And I guess we are not supposed to ask why neighbourhoods were not maintained in the first place. We will, however, get an opportunity to provide our input. Goodness knows doing so has had little or no impact on any budget in the past. But we do get to dance a little even if no real relationship results.

But as odd as the budget situation is, at the same time the city is beginning its deliberations and allegedly asking for public input, we are still in the throes of negotiating with Emperor Katz about funding for the downtown arena.

At least city council was shamed into making some of these discussions public rather than conducting them behind closed doors. Apparently, our civic masters found out that transparency is all the rage these days. Though they understand what the word means, I am not sure they have really grasped the concept.

If public input is important for the budget, why is it not important to ask us directly if we want hundreds of millions spent on a new arena? The discussion seems to have been going on forever. Why has nobody said “Enough is enough and let’s just ask Edmontonians what they actually want?” One could argue that a plebiscite would be expensive, but it wouldn’t be more expensive than our share of the arena costs. We took the plebiscite approach when it came to funding the convention centre.

Maybe this time it’s because the powers that be knew that the answer was a foregone conclusion.