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 A lot of that issue rests at the feet of outdated provincial laws around development and development charges.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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4 Responses

  1. C from Kanata says:

    If you factor in the transit levy and the water and sewer upgrades which are astronomical and no longer part of the taxes, but are tacked onto the water bill, we’re close to 9% tax increases already. Politicians are omitting the overall cost increases we are facing. The increased transit levy plus the 2.9 % tax increase plus the approximately 9% water and rain tax coming, will put us well over 10%. And the politicians want to increase the 2.9%?

  2. Ron Benn says:

    C, presenting facts to combat rhetoric. How dare you?

    How dare you use basic arithmetic? Where you add up what you paid this year and divide it by how much you paid last year to get a percent increase? How dare you point out the inconsistency between your fact based analysis and the city’s third rate carnival act of financial conjuring?

  3. Donny Brooke says:

    Not one more dime.

    It’s gaslighting to describe City of Ottawa budgeting as anything like “austerity”.

    Neither higher taxes or a federal and provincial bailout will ever fix the municipal fiscal problem.

    Ottawa’s problem is foolish spending.

    Successive councils have flushed away vast amounts of money pursuing the doomed prescriptions of Watson-omics, chasing a fantasy of turning the Town that Fun Forgot into some kind of government-themed tourist attraction.

    Instead of a shiny utopia, all they’ve got to show for it is a decaying Frankenstein cross between EPCOT and a Soviet Model City.

    Over here is a vast LRT boondoggle based on ridership projections that were wildly exaggerated from day one. Over there, a vanity library on LeBreton Flats when dead tree book circulation is obsolete. Wow, check out the additional millions in bailouts for the guaranteed-to-fail Lansdowne real estate development.

    The list goes on and on. If Ottawa council is doing it, it doesn’t work.

    And they just won’t stop.

    Mayor Sutcliffe, leadership is calling collect.

    Will you accept the charges?

  4. Ron Benn says:

    Imagine, if you will Councillor Devine, how much in replacement playground recreational structures could be funded with just 10% of the almost half billion dollar capital cost of Lansdowne 2.x. Priorities Councillor, priorities.

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