UPDATE ON EAST LONDON COMMUNITY CENTRE CONSTRUCTION
Dear Argyle Residents,
I know we’ve all been waiting a long time for the Argyle neighbourhood to get a proper community centre, over 19 years in fact.
It was a privilege to stand with (then) Mayor Brown in the fall of 2017 and officially break ground on the construction site.
And, it has been a disappointment to have the opening repeatedly pushed back from fall of 2018 to spring of 2019, to fall of 2019.
Since being elected I’ve stopped by the work site and connected with the management team on a regular basis. I know they’ve been doing what they can.
Unfortunately, it falls to me to share the bad news that we are still behind schedule.
Statement on Blackridge Strategies
During the 2018 Municipal Election Campaign, I contracted work to Blackridge Strategies for 2 items. Those items were a phone poll in Ward 2 to gage voter sentiments and a “get out the vote” phone message on Election Day as I did not have the capacity to execute these two items myself. I chose Blackridge because they were local, not some firm out of Ottawa or Toronto.
Throughout the campaign, my social media, printed materials and website content were produced 100% by me and my campaign team, not Blackridge Strategies.
I consider former Councillor Ridley a friend, and in fact shared a campaign platform announcement with her, so recent news regarding a smear campaign allegedly coming from individuals with Blackridge bothers me considerably. Criticizing former Councillor Ridley’s parenting is especially troublesome to me because as someone who also has a parental role there have been occasions when a child in my care has had occupied themselves at city hall while I’ve had to fulfilled council duties. I have not faced criticism for this and I think that illustrates the double standard women unfairly face.
Politics can be combative, but the focus should be the issues facing our community. Obviously in light of recent developments, I will not be contracting future work with Blackridge Strategies.
Multi-year Budgets and Provincial Uncertainty
I recently had the opportunity to speak with London Free Press columnist Chip Martin about the city’s next multi-year budget cycle.
Already the Ford Government in Ontario has downloaded or cut services that will add at least $4 million to the city’s budget costs. Staff have already told council just to stay on track next year we need to raise property taxes another 2.7%. And of course we have a federal election looming this year that could result in more changes to affordability for Londoners. That concerns me a great deal. Seniors on CPP and OAS benefits aren’t able to keep pace with those kind of increases and stay in their homes. The rising costs of groceries, hydro bills, and everything else is making it harder and harder for people to make ends meet, and property taxes are the LEAST FAIR form of taxes possible.
People should make no mistake, decisions of senior levels of government have profound financial impacts on municipal governance. Continue Reading
Time to Say No to a Bridge to Nowhere
The 2014-2018 Council (including the former Ward 2 Councillor), set aside $5 million to potentially fund the “Ribbon of the Thames” portion of the “Back to the River” project.
What has become known as the “bridge to nowhere”, a suspended lookout bridge and river facing amphitheater space, has already ballooned in cost from $2 million to $7 million, with additional costs for shoreline work, excavation, and flood mitigation measures coming in at another $3-4 million.
Staff pegs the cost of the “Ribbon of the Thames” at a minimum of $12.8 million dollars, with only $2 million in private donations from the London Community Foundation, leaving the project with at least a $5 million funding gap even if we spend all $5 million of the public dollars set aside.
And that’s without spending a penny on the removal of the decommissioned Springbank Bank that has gates and hydraulic systems currently sitting at the bottom of the river. Continue Reading
An Inside Look at Construction of the East London Community Centre
Opening in the fall of 2019, even if it might not appear so from the roadside, construction of the East London Community Centre is moving along well.
Ward 2 Gets $6 Million Infrastructure Renewal Approval
During the election campaign one of the things I promised to do was to make the renewal of the Calgary, Churchill, Edmonton, Manitoba, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Whitney Street area of Ward 2 a priority.
I was sworn in as your Councillor on December 4th. Getting started on this was my first priority and on December 5th I sat down with our City Engineer, Manager of Roads, and Director of Water and Wastewater. As you know, it is not just the roads that are in bad shape, sewer and drainage upgrades are needed as well, Whitney and Calgary Streets shouldn’t flood every time it rains. It was at this meeting that I learned that some of the drainage in the area dates back to the 1920’s and the City of London’s infrastructure renewal for this neighbourhood was not in the plans to be completed until 2029- 2030!!!
I made it clear that wasn’t good enough. Not only had residents been led to belief for years that improvements were “just a couple of years away”, but the city was constructing a $20 million community centre in East Lion’s Park with no plan to upgrade the roads around it for another decade!
The BRT Vote and Better Transit, What Does It All Mean?
After almost 4 years of the Matt Brown led council insisting that their BRT plan absolutely had to be an all or nothing decision, staff clearly indicated to the new council that not only could the BRT plan be broken up into pieces and still be viable, but that other options besides the old BRT plan were available which could qualify for provincial and federal funding.
A list of 19 projects came to council to decide which ones to submit for federal and provincial funding approval. These included; 5 component pieces of the old BRT plan, an intelligent traffic signal management system, bus stop amenities including 60 new bus shelters, the purchase of more buses, a portion of the Adelaide St. underpass design, an intersection improvement project for Wharncliffe & Oxford, Thames Valley Parkway connections, pedestrian connections to the transit network, new sidewalks, and three different cycling proposals along with a couple of others.
What changed from the old BRT plan? Continue Reading
In Debate on BRT: The Argyle View
Discussing in the first video how Argyle residents feel about always being left out when it comes to service and investment from city hall.
In the second video, presenting an amendment to the East London Link rapid transit proposal to include improved service to Argyle, the airport, and employers along Veterans Memorial Parkway to get people to jobs.
Listening to Londoners Frustrations on Snow Removal
From the London Free Press:
Coun. Shawn Lewis spent much of his long weekend listening to Londoners voicing frustrations about city hall’s snow-removal service.
The rookie Ward 2 councillor says he received a flood of complaints from his constituents and residents of other wards after a weekend snowfall blanketed streets and sidewalks that were already covered in ice.
“I was actually hearing from people from wards all across the city,” Lewis said Tuesday.
“Pretty much everything I heard this week from constituents was about how bad the roads were. I had people tweeting me about it, I had Facebook messages, phone calls, emails, the whole gambit.”
Making snow removal one of his priorities, Lewis last month suggested city hall should lower its minimum threshold for sending plows into the streets…
Read the full story at:
Snow-removal complaints piled up over wintry long weekend: Politician
Making a Responsible Budget Decision
In the 2019 Budget deliberations an item of contention arose around removing $521,000 from the anticipated budget costs that was earmarked last year for a provincially legislated minimum wage hike. With the change in provincial government, that requirement was removed. It was the staff recommendation that we not proceed with a wage increase and remove that earmarked amount from the budget.
Advocates have argued that “it was in the budget already, you shouldn’t remove it”. But of course things that were not anticipated had to be added to the operating budget, including additional funding for ambulance services to tackle growing response times ($590,000), cycle network maintenance ($408,000, required to meet new provincial standards), mental health funding for police officers ($161,000) and restoring seniors bus tickets ($285,000) transit access at a more affordable rate. In total, over $1.4 million in operating costs not planned for were added.
The result, the increase this year is 2.7%. In comparison a senior in our community living on Canada Pension Plan benefits will receive only a 1.5% increase.
Making budget choices is never easy. And whether in a council seat, or as resident of the city, budget decisions need to balance care and cost, and also need to be considered in context and in impact, not ideology. Continue Reading