[browna]

Some gems in there.

Good ol' Ken, speaking for all (or at least the few in the gathered crowd who agreed with him) Calgarians, playing the "taxpayer" card. I wonder if he tells cops that they work for him too, and not to give him that ticket. Or tells Ken King, that being a ticket holder to the Flames game he goes to, he demands them to fire Keenan.

I wonder if Ken is going to run for mayor and fix it all?


"The $25 million approved for two inner-city pedestrian bridges was a hot topic, even though that project has no impact on people's taxes.

Money for the bridges comes from the capital budget, while the operating budget is the key in setting tax levels"

and

We are the lowest-taxed city in Canada," said David Hartwick, who brought his eight-year-old daughter, Denika, to City Hall.
"My concern is how they spend it. They could have built a north-central leg of the LRT and it would have served more people than the west leg."

First, isn't that under the capital budget too? And gee, you think he lives north central, and's never been west of 10 St? And where would that route run up? Has he looked at a map of Calgary and where the current C-train lines are currently, and can honestly say that somewhere around Edmonton trail deserves a Ctrain route before the entire west side of Calgary?

And who wants to guess that Colley-Urquhart is going to run for mayor next, and her little stunt to get people to sign her petition at this thing, right in front of Bronconnier.

Problem being, she gets her wish of a budget raise of 4% this year, and then when she's mayor in a couple years, she has to deal with the then severly underfunded areas that would've had some money flowing through it in this budget. Of course, she'll just complain about it being Bronconier's fault, but that and 50c will by a paper and the problem will still be there.

Meh about Bronconnier either way, but this sounds more like people cluelessly glancing at the blaring headlines on the front page of the Calgary Sun, and then storming into city hall complianing and demanding answers. City services cost more every year, like everything else does, and the city has one shot a year to collect that. With the downturn in the economy in the last few months, people are a bit tighter with thier money and don't realize that they've been living a little high off the hog for the last few years, and that living in this city has a price tag that's more then what people think its worth. The growth in the suburbs have created exponetial need for expanded city services which people are completly clueless about because it doesn't affect them. (I won't get into that argument, with new developments should be paying a larger share of the need to expand those services).

I'm truly surprised there wasn't some comment in there about oil prices so high in the year that the city should afford some of these projects on their own as a result....sounds like something that would come up from someone in that lot.