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This comes a month before city hall learns what sort of infrastructure grant cuts the provincial budget will bring to cope with the resource royalty. It’s naive to think there won’t be cuts, Demong said.

“To me, this is just sound financial management,” he said.

“If you don’t know what you’re getting in your next paycheque, you’d better be careful what you’re spending your current paycheque on.”

Photo by Colleen De Neve / Calgary Herald

The savings generated by his idea would amount to around $5 million for this year’s art projects, plus whatever is left over and not yet committed in previous years’ arts accounts.

That could pay for unfunded fire hall upgrades or dozens of new safety lights at crosswalks, said the councillor for Calgary’s deep south.

But it’s a puny amount in the city’s $1.8-billion annual projects budget.

“Let’s look at the other 99 per cent of public projects,” said Coun. Evan Woolley. Before politics, he worked for the city’s public art program.

“What kind of tech company, when we’re trying to diversify our economy, will want to come to an ugly city?”

Public art has for years drawn controversy among council conservatives and city hall critics. Projects like the giant blue ring on 96th Avenue N.E. get pilloried as wasteful, though several smaller projects have drawn appreciation like some LRT beautification efforts and a Bow River celebration project in 2010.

Last year, Demong successfully fought to cap the amount of public art funding for large projects to $4 million, even if that’s less than the one-per-cent art component the decade-old policy asks to be set aside.