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A Budget that Meets Your Needs
Ottawa’s budget planning is incomprehensible, uninformed, and fails to listen to residents year after year.
Currently, staff propose a moderate tax increase based on an arbitrary guess about what tax payers might be willing to put up with. Council goes along, and then staff find ways to cut programs to the bone to fit within this artificial number.
Dare to ask how much it would cost to make something like OC Transpo work? You
won’t get a number. You’ll be told they can work within the envelope. And every
department will say the same: they can do it.
They can’t. They haven’t.
So we see roads that haven’t been maintained. Parks with spilling garbage and
broken benches. Facilities that need upgrades or replacing. We have to change how we approach our budgets. We need to start with questions to residents: what do you want? What are your priorities? What are you willing to sacrifice?
And then we need to ask staff: tell us truthfully, how much will this cost?
Then Council can make the political decisions, publicly and transparently, on what
we fund, how much, and what we choose not to fund. Our tax adjustments will come
from that, and you’ll know how we got there.
This is the fundamental problem that the City currently faces, and why so many of
you are frustrated with the decisions that are being made. It’s not a transparent
approach to budgeting, but one that politicians can hide behind. That isn’t good
enough and it’s failing our City.
Solutions
- We need a new approach to budgeting that reveals the true costs of managing our city
- Fight for the implementation of my multi-year budgeting motion from 2022 so taxpayers can see and know where our money is going, and what investments they are getting for it over the long term
Infrastructure Investments in Mature Neighbourhoods
We have a crisis coming, and it’s going to be worse for outer urban wards like College Ward. Our neighbourhoods were built mostly 60 or 70 years ago. They came with some fantastic recreational facilities like Pinecrest Recreation Centre and Entrance Pool.
But while the city is building new sports centres in the newest subdivisions, they haven’t been keeping up with the maintenance of our cherished facilities. And they are threatening to shut them down instead of fixing them up.
That’s unacceptable and I called this to Council’s and the public’s attention earlier this year.
Too often, College Ward is treated like the poor cousin. Downtown gets investments because of its bigger population. New subdivisions get investments because they benefit from different revenue sources and modern plans. But we get left behind again and again.
Our roads are so full of cracks and potholes that they’re an embarrassment to look at and a problem to drive on. Staff have said they’re looking at a new model for resurfacing smaller sections of roads where needed, but we haven’t seen any progress on this yet.
We need to fight for our communities’ facilities. I will not take no for an answer.
Solutions
- Recreational facilities, like Entrace Pool, need committed rehabilitation or replacement plans before they are shuttered
- Increased road resurfacing on our neighbourhood streets
- Better ways of prioritizing road resurfacing, including bundling of small works, to get resurfacing done faster where we live
Coordinating Projects
You see it too often. A road shut down for construction on one side of your commute, only to find that going the other direction leads you into another construction project.
Where is the coordination? Why are these allowed to happen at the same time?
With multiple agencies – the City, the LRT project, the NCC, MTO, utility companies, and more all doing separate projects, it’s easy to see how we end up in a frustrating rats’ nest of construction that doesn’t allow any way out.
And you don’t see the half of it. My team routinely alerts one project manager about another project. We’ve seen a plan for tree planting just ahead of road construction that would have removed those new trees (we stopped that); we’ve seen a utility company plan to dig a trench on a street that was about to have new road construction (we coordinated that); we saw a highway closure that would have detoured traffic through an under-construction intersection already over-congested (we didn’t permit that).
Some cities do it differently. They coordinate all of these projects. They put up signage that leads to information about the who, why, and when of a project. They ensure that there isn’t too much in one area at any given time.
Why don’t we do that? Staff claim that we do, but we’ve seen too many times that we don’t. We can do better.
Solutions
- The City of Ottawa must survey other municipalities for best practices to coordinate construction projects
- Implementation of a new system, like a central office, responsible for clear information and good coordination of construction projects across jurisdictions and city departments
Continuous Learning and Aggressive Corporate Improvement
The City is vulnerable to repeating the same mistakes over and over again because the mechanisms for sharing, learning, and implementing solutions is diluted across junior staff and has no checks and balances. I have been alarmed by the complacency on this issue over the last four years. Non-profit corporations, the world that I came from, can’t afford this waste, as they work with donations and public money.
The City is no different, but we repeat the same errors over and over again at the taxpayers expense.
Solutions
- The City must demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning and corporate improvement through its strategic priorities and systems in the next term of Council.
- A central office dedicated to professional evaluation and quality control must be established, with regular reports to committee and council.