Taxpayers Will Cover Budget Hole: THE VOTER
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe believed either that just explaining the ‘facts’ as he saw them would get the feds and province to pull out the chequebook.
Or perhaps he thought he could somehow shame the senior levels of government, whether or not his argument held water, into paying up. Or maybe he had this bright idea and decided to run it up the flagpole and see if anybody saluted it.
Sutcliffe can, as a relative newbie, be forgiven for giving it a try. However, you can’t be as generous with the other members of Ottawa City Council that gave him unanimous support for this charging at windmills. Most of council has been around long enough to know the ropes around PILTs and equally that the city’s budget must, by law, be balanced.
Sutcliffe himself should have put a timeframe on his so-called Fairness Campaign and then dropped it when it became clear it was going nowhere. That should have happened in October when he was two months in and had been clearly told “no” by both the feds and the province. Here we are six months after the campaign’s launch and one illegal budget adoption later and he’s still tilting at windmills.
How he persuaded all of council to both back this ludicrous campaign and then pass a budget with a $38-million hole in it is beyond me. It is time, though, for councillors to stand up and call him on both of those counts.
What must happen eventually is that the budget will have to be re-jigged and the $38-million hole filled in. That will require drastic cuts since there are few areas in the budget that are discretionary and available for council to cut. The further we get into the fiscal year, the more of the budget will have been spent, the less room there will be to make any cuts and the deeper those cuts will have to be.
If council has any alternate plan at all, it’s past time it was shared with the rest of the city. Once more, we are the ones who will be left to pick up the pieces.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
Or they could put speed cameras on every street!
In an administration stuffed with people making 100K+, I know where I’d start.
THE TAXPPAYER WILL COVER THE HOLE!
WHAT THE HELL ELSE IS NEW?
Taxpayers are always on the hook for polititians’ and pencil pushers’ screw-ups.
THEN, ADDING INSULT TO INJURY MANY OF THESE BUGGERS GET BONUSES, RAISES AND INDEXEED PENSIONS.
Every level of government is the same…….they sound decent when running for office…….once in or hired it’s the same sleeze, grabbing everything they can get, (honest or otherwise), disregard screw-ups and waste, use and abuse the taxpayers, and everyone of them laughs all the way to the bank.
Not an ounce of regret or decency in any of them.
ENTITLED.!.
IT SHOULD BE THE POLITITANS AND PENCIL PUSHERS THAT PAY FOR THE WASTE, SCREW-UPS AND MISTAKES.
And these entitleds wonder why they are dispised.