Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
I will probably vote McIvor and join 'Burn This City' in his fan club. Should this have been 9 years ago after a decade of Al Duer and a huge backlog of infrastructure projects, I would be voting Nenshi. However we're exiting a period where a lot of infrastructure has been built and in the midst of the crazyness of growth, cost control took a back seat for promptness. The problems in the audit office highlight that. It's now time to rethink how the city is run and how much money it takes to run it. We can get back to vision building after the city relearns how to properly budget and execute.
|
Fair enough, but is McIver
truly the person capable of reining in costs? Does he know how to do it? Do his actions as an Alderman in the past 9 years actually indicate an ability to reform the system? In fact, his actions may indicate the opposite.
While he was wasting council time compaining about 2 lanes being closed on a sunday for a festival and hassling chinatown for every line item of its $500,000 centenary celebration, he also was working hand-in-hand with suburban developers during Plan-It to reduce minimum densities to levels below what current subdivisions are being planned at. He successfully shepherded an amendment to the municipal development plan that dropped recommended required densities from 70 down to 60 people/jobs per hectare (with zero public consultation at the last minute by the way). One single move that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions, if not a couple of billion in the cost of servicing new growth on the fringe of the city over the next several decades. At the same time, he was also one of the only alderman that wanted to continue with the expo 2017 bid despite it being a guaranteed $1 billion money loser.
A couple Nenshi herald editorials articulate this well:
http://www.nenshi.ca/new/give-calgarians
http://www.nenshi.ca/new/fiscal-conservatives
Despite McIver being effective at trumping himself up as a strong fiscal conservative by chest thumping during budget deliberations, on the whole his approach is costing us more in the end. If we want cost control and lower taxes, Nenshi's probably a much better bet in reality.