Fixing Ottawa’s Public finances

In recent years, the City of Ottawa has taken on a worrying amount of debt. With inflation stubbornly high and interest rates rising, our City’s budget is at risk of being further squeezed – resulting in either higher taxes on residents or reduced services for our communities – unless serious effort is made to improve our public finances.

We will be working with City Staff, other Councillors, and the Mayor’s Office to pursue a strategy to get our public finances back on track so that we can afford the priorities of our communities without passing the burden of increased costs back to residents. This will include efforts toward pursuing a line-by-line program review of our City’s budget, increased support for the City’s auditing teams, and much more.

If we can fix our City’s budget before the challenges introduced by debt, deficit, and interest payments become too large, we will save greatly in the long term. These savings can go directly back into other vital priorities for our communities.

Making our city more efficient and transparent

Over the years, successive Councils have funded a wide range of priorities – many important and valuable initiatives for our communities. However, while our City has done a good job of adding, we have done a relatively poor job of ensuring that the core services delivered by our City are done effectively and efficiently. Improving Ottawa’s efficiency as a City is necessary to ensure that City Staff are applying themselves as effectively as possible and that services are being delivered in a manner that respects residents’ tax dollars.

Promoting a more efficient City will require an assessment of what the municipal government should and should not be doing. We need to get the basics right before pursuing other priorities. This is ultimately how we can ensure that programs and services are sustainably delivered for our communities.

Additionally, for this to be successful, greater transparency is needed. Councillors must ensure that they are holding the City to account for the decisions that are made with your tax dollars. We will work to promote a greater role for Councillors in supporting our communities in this regard.

Addressing our infrastructure deficit

Our roads, bridges, sidewalks and more are falling to the wayside. Our City is growing, but support for infrastructure is failing to keep pace; this is being felt acutely in our Ward. Urgent action is needed to provide everyone in our City with the infrastructure necessary to facilitate living in our communities.

We will seek to introduce stronger mechanisms to ensure that infrastructure is funded as a priority in our City. This will include earmarking greater investments toward infrastructure, reallocating funding from less important priorities, studying the viability of dedicated levies for new properties, and more.

Infrastructure is not something merely nice to have; it is a vital priority for any municipality. In this term of council, we will ensure that the infrastructure deficit is addressed.

Meeting local challenges

The most important role of any Councillor is ensuring that the needs of residents his or her Ward are being properly addressed. In recent years, we have heard feedback that greater effort is needed to address a number of local priorities.

The two that most immediately need to be addressed in our communities are the truck traffic on Bridge Street in Manotick and the lack of a traffic light at the intersection of Perth and Shea in Richmond. Getting these large trucks out of Manotick is important precisely because the community was not designed to handle the massive number of large vehicles. Beyond the disruption, noise, and impact on business caused by these trucks, there are serious safety concerns as these trucks cannot safely navigate the streets and intersections in the Village. We will seek to address this challenge with the urgency that is so clearly required.

And as Richmond grows as a community, so too do demands for better infrastructure to manage traffic. Nowhere is this more clear than at the intersection of Perth and Shea. Turning is at present dangerous, and with increased traffic through the community, such measures are needed to help address speeding and manage the flow of vehicles. This is a major priority for the community and thus will receive appropriate levels of attention.

These are but a couple of the issues that we are seeking to urgently meet with real solutions. We also are instituting a better process for ensuring that issues brought to the Constituency office are addressed promptly and to the best of our team’s ability.