Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Seperate the polls from what you read and see and hear from people. Polls are about as relevant as the number of people polled. I think we've also seen that polls in the last few elections have significantly departed from actual results. Yes the sun is a rag, but reading editorials in the sun and herald and reader feedback, absolutely Nenshi is feeling some heat from voters on the property tax and provincial tax grab and too many closed door off camera meetings and a lot of other issues.
His message in the last election was far different. He came across as a fiscal conservative, he was going to do a better job with our money then the previous mayor. He was going to open things up in terms of transparency, he was going to gain control of the cities bureaucracy and cut waste. That message was relevant to city voters.
|
A couple things I want to address - first on the tax room - or as you characterize, a "tax grab".
Fair ball - if you want to characterize it that way, that's fine. But let's remember the context in which the City took the tax room and what it was used for. It's purely for capital projects - in a context where there are no new provincial grants, existing promised grants are being rolled back, and the Federal Gov't hasn't provided any help (an in fact yanked promised funding - $100m from P3 Canada for Rec Centres).
So, we had two choices - go back to the days of Duerr and build nothing and fall way behind in a fast growing city), or take matters into our own hands as a municipality and build.
People often laud the stuff getting built - which is this:
2011: $42 million annually created the
Community Investment Fund, which is funding the new Central Library, 4 new regional recreation centres in NW and SE Calgary, 3 new library branches and maintenance and upgrades to parks, arenas, swimming pools, and other recreation facilities across the city.
2012: $10.2 million annually was distributed to five areas: $2 million for sidewalks (replaces the 50% resident share for sidewalk replacements), $2 million to improve transit system reliability, $2 million for targeted traffic congestion solutions, $2 million for lifecycle maintenance of City buildings, and $2.2 million for enhancing community facilities like community halls.
2013: $52 million for flood recovery (repairing things like bridges, roadways that the City will not recover from insurance or provincial or federal disaster recovery programs). Future allocation of this annual tax room amount is yet to be decided by Council.
Then some deride the ONLY method by which we would have been able to build any of those things.
On the question of City spending - while services have increased (snow removal budget, increase in police, etc) the per capita cost per citizen of delivering all services (operating budget) accounting for inflation and population growth is level.
The Mayor cut $108 million from the 2012-2014 operating budget and implemented zero-based reviews - which are now being done on the two largest business units in the City - Parks and Roads (about 5000 employees). It's a systematic method to improve service delivery and improve efficiency of that service delivery - will save us millions per department. Yeah, it's not an across the board slash and burn approach that's super quick, but those approaches don't ever affect real systematic efficiency.