Austerity Put City In Fiscal Pickle: DEVINE

This is an edited excerpt from a ward newsletter by Knoxdale-Merivale Councillor Sean Devine

Last week I had a meeting with staff from the Recreation, Culture & Facility Services department to discuss long-term goals for the eventual replacement of some of the older recreational facilities and community centres in Ward 9.

“So, what’s the plan”, I asked.

There was a pause, as they considered how to answer a question that doesn’t currently have an answer.

But sometimes, depending on what you’re asking for, or where in the city you’re asking to put it, there are different answers to these kinds of questions.

When it comes to the lifecycle replacement of our city’s existing recreational facilities, I was told that there’s a $3.8 billion gap in long-term funding. And so, when one of our city’s older facilities starts to fail (e.g. the fieldhouses in Trend Arlington Park or in Inverness Park, which were each built in the early 1970s), there will not be money to replace them. It’s even harder to envision having the resources to build a new facility to serve the neighborhoods of Country Place, Merivale Gardens, and the Glens, where they’ve never had any kind of facility at all.

However, if you live in the city’s ever-expanding outlying communities, where new suburban development thrives, you will find new recreational facilities, fully equipped parks, brand new roads, roundabouts, and sidewalks. But in our more established wards, it can take decades before a road gets re-paved, or a sidewalk repaired. A lot of that issue rests at the feet of outdated provincial laws around development and development charges. That, however, is a subject for another issue of the newsletter …

… In early August, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe launched his Fairness for Ottawa campaign. As you’ll read in the segment below, I supported a motion that came to last week’s Ottawa City Council meeting to endorse the mayor’s campaign, but with a certain amount of frustration. Because while I do support the mayor’s objectives to seek a fairer allocation of funding from the provincial and federal governments (especially when it comes to funding for transit operation), I can’t support the narrative that lies at the heart of the mayor’s campaign. It’s a narrative that continues to downplay our city’s role in how we got to this financially untenable position. In the segment below, we look at a problem we have created for ourselves by pursuing unreasonably low tax increases—30 per cent below the average municipal increase—over the last decade. We have fallen behind most other jurisdictions in maintaining a healthy revenue stream, simply for the sake of maintaining the appearance of holding the line on taxes.

… I’m going to keep on talking about this. It’s not going to be an easy conversation. But it would be irresponsible of me not to inform you about the ways in which we bear responsibility for a large part of our current predicament so that we can work together toward sensible, sustainable solutions.

For You:

Fix The Train

Kids Used As Political Deflection: THE VOTER

Get It Together City Of Ottawa: PATTON

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