Every budget line in a city the size of Cambridge represents a choice. Money spent on one project is money not spent on a road, a park, or a recreation programme somewhere else. That is not a reason to spend nothing. It is a reason to ask better questions before we spend anything.
Four questions I would ask about any major spend
What problem is this actually solving? Not the project description — the problem. If nobody can state it in one sentence, the scope is going to drift, and drift is where budgets die.
What does it cost to run, not just to build? A new facility has a capital price tag and an operating price tag. The second one arrives every single year afterwards, and it is the one that quietly squeezes everything else.
What happens if we are wrong? In twenty years of operations work, the projects that hurt were never the ones that failed loudly on day one. They were the ones with no plan for what to do when an assumption turned out to be optimistic.
How will residents know whether it worked? If we cannot say in advance what success looks like, we will never be able to say afterwards whether we got it.
This is not about spending less
Ward 5 needs roads maintained, sidewalks cleared and services that show up. I am not interested in cutting for the sake of cutting. I am interested in knowing that when we do spend, we spend on the thing residents actually needed, at a price we understood going in.
That is the operations mindset: plan properly, monitor closely, and hold yourself accountable for the outcome. City Hall should work the same way.