Troubling, but expected by now...
Burst water main closes section of Elgin
By Teresa smith, Ottawa Citizen October 26, 2012 8:25 AM
OTTAWA — Police say they expect Elgin Street to remain closed at least until this afternoon due to a burst water main burst at the corner of Elgin Street and Laurier Avenue.
Elgin between Laurier and Lisgar is closed to southbound traffic and reduced to one lane for northbound traffic.
Staff Sgt. David Lockhart said the break was “fairly substantial,” and the city has asked police to monitor traffic along Elgin while the engineering department tries to find out where the problem started.
[email protected]
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Read more:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Burst+w...#ixzz2APO1hmmG
More troubling (to me) is the bolded piece of information within the following article:
Can Alta Vista corridor cash be used for social services?
October 25, 2012. 1:29 pm • Section: City Hall
By Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen October 25, 2012 1:29 PM
Apparently, no.
My latest column on the 2013 draft budget discussed the rather inflexible nature of the city budget process. The province is short-changing Ottawa to the tune of about $7.5 million in funds for social services for our most vulnerable citizens — we’re talking about eye glasses and hearing aids and decent funerals for people on welfare and disability, helping out with emergency hydro and rent payments to prevent people from becoming homeless and having to rely on shelters (the most expensive way to house folks living on the margins).
Although the shortfall is the fault of the province, the lack of debate over the budget as a whole makes it even more difficult than it already is to find money to stop-gap the shortages in services. One reason for this is that councillors only discuss moving money around within single departments, say transit or planning or, in this case, community and protective services. There’s hardly any chance for councillors to discuss moving spending from one department to another.
This sentence from my column — “What about discussing, for example, why the 1.2-kilometre Alta Vista corridor connecting the hospital and Riverside Drive has to cost $55 million?” — elicited a few responses, the most authoritative from Councillor Peter Hume, who is both the ward councillor where the Alta Vista corridor is to be located and the chair of the planning committee.
Here’s part of what he wrote in an email:
You lead the readers to believe that if we eliminated the Hospital Link project we would be able “to ponder, say, the possibility of moving a few bucks from some other department over to social services.” .
Unfortunately, you can’t take any of the funds allocated to the Hospital Link to fund social services or any other on-going City operation.
85% ($43M) of the funding for the link comes from Development Charges and must be used for growth related road projects. You could put this funding back in the Development Charge reserve fund and spend it on a growth road project in another community but you can’t spend it on social services, parks, recreation or the library. You can’t even spend the money to rehabilitate existing infrastructure – it must, by law, be used for the purpose for which it was collected – growth related road projects.
The remaining 15% ($5.5m) is debt funding. It can be used in any other capital project – Ottawa on the Move, build more social housing – whatever capital projects City Council directs. But it can’t be spent on the ongoing city operations because it isn’t on-going – it is one time money.
I don’t mind debating the reasons to invest development charges in the hospital link but I can’t debate moving the money from the link to social services because you can’t do that.
Frustrating. (Although I’m still not convinced we need a $55-million calibre road if all it’s supposed to do is connect the General Campus of the Ottawa Hospital to Riverside.)
Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that in the past two years, council hasn’t really debated the budget as a whole. This year, for example, they might want to discuss increasing the tax rate a smidge to save a services. There’s still room within the 2.5% maximum that Mayor Jim Watson set — the urban tax rate is set to increase by about 2.1% and the rural rate by almost 2%. An additional 0.1 percentage point increase in the tax rate would add about $1 million to the city’s coffers, which can pay for a lot of emergency hydro bills and hearing aids.
Raising taxes isn’t a long-term solution to dealing with the looming problem on provincial downloading of costs. But council should at least have a public discussion about the possibility.
This is obviously a significant problem that needs to be addressed and solved. There is no way that 85% of the money collected should be earmarked directly towards (NEW) road infrastructure without any consideration for other effective means of supporting intensification and development around the city. How on earth can we possibly improve upon and change our car-centric societies and cities when our planning legislation is driven by backwards 1960s ideologies?
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