Walking in Waterloo Region

[ijmorlan]

Hard to say for sure, I do know I've heard many individuals express the belief that the city should clear the sidewalks.  They don't seem to clue in that they'd be the ones paying for it, instead they seem to feel entitled to have the city do it for free.  Of course, I'm the entitlement generation.

An important part of the city-cleared sidewalks argument is that it wold be substantially cheaper if done using a city-owned bobcat snowplower.

Exactly. Right now, property tax consists of a certain amount of money, plus the in-kind requirement to clear the sidewalk. The idea is to eliminate the in-kind requirement and replace it with a small additional money amount on the property tax. The money amount is almost indisputably smaller than the value of the in-kind requirement. The only conceivable counter-argument I can think of is that the snow clearing is part of the property owner’s exercise program or is somehow otherwise actually a benefit for them.

In short, the honest lower-taxes position is for the city to clear the sidewalks.

Or, to simply remove the requirement but I don’t think that’s really a reasonable option at all.

There really isn’t a colourable argument for the status quo at all. The only legitimate question is how thorough a job should the City do? So presumably they would have a small snow plow. Should it be followed by an army of low-rent people with shovels to clean up any small amounts missed by the snow plow? Is there anything else they could do? Should there be an option to have them do ones front walk and/or driveway? How should plowrows be handled? This is where the debate should be, not on a bogus debate about whether the City should be involved at all.