Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

Actually property taxes are explicitly wealth tax...by raising property tax, you explicitly tax the wealth people have. Now I'm sure you are speaking colloquially, plenty of people who live paycheque to paycheque have a high net worth because they bought a home (and vehicles) beyond their means.

I assume you meant to make this distinction?

1. New spending, i.e., the money we will waste on pro-active bylaw enforcement, that is not currently in the budget and

2. Planned spending, things we have already figured out how to pay for in previous years.

I would very much like to see 2 evaluated. We are doing things like widening roads and spending on police (regional I realize) that are a very poor use of money, but are never questioned...

I would love to hear my question answered though, why are we introducing new spending which all evidence we have says it doesn't acheive anything of value.

1. The money spent on proactive snow-clearing is inconsequential compared to full clearing.  i.e less than $1 per avg household annually.

2. This is a popular sentiment among the anti-car folks, but to my knowledge, we have only *reduced* the number of car-lanes since my election in 2010.  Certainly true in my ward... where there have been zero additional car-lanes added in my 10 years, and a reduction at least on Lorraine Ave from 4 to 2 to accommodate cycling infrastructure.

*Police services are beyond my jurisdiction as a lower-tier councillor.

I give the city credit where credit is due. The city has been far more progressive on transportation than the region (which you absolutely do have sway over, city councillors sit on project committees, and your voice carries weight...or more than mine at least).

But there are still major projects planned, you only need to take a look at the city's transportation master plan to see a list of planned and completed projects: https://www.kitchener.ca/en/resourcesGen...n_2013.pdf

And while the city is progressive compared with the region, the plan is awfully dated sounding (time to update it?), because it still has VMT growth and road expansion as a foregone conclusion.

The most frustrating to me is Belmont Rd. it was completely reconstructed with four lanes, despite the four lane configuration being an artifact from a cancelled 1960s plan to connect to Homer-Watson. You voted for that sir. Did you question why we needed a four lane road there? That cost millions of dollars to reconstruct. What a waste.

For point 1...don't give me that baloney...you strongly objected to the sidewalk clearing pilot which cost a similar amount of money, so don't tell me it doesn't matter now...throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars is bad policy.