By Brooke Hunter and Sarah McQuillen
Centretown residents couldn’t see past the snow during a recentpublic consultation for the City of Ottawa’s draft budget.
Nearly 50 residents were in attendance at the meeting for Somerset Ward held at McNabb Community Centre Jan. 19. While residents were concerned about proposed increases in user fees and transit services, snow was the big issue.
The new winter maintenance standards, which call for residential sidewalks to be cleared to a snow packed standard instead of bare cement, hasn’t gone over well with residents.
“I have lived in the same house for 42 years,” said one angry Centretown resident. “And I have never seen the city in such a state of disrepair.”
Part of the problem is the city budget no longer gives snow clearing crews the flexibility to respond to unanticipated changes in the weather like ice from the storm that hit during the holidays, which was so heavy that more than half of the city’s 43 sidewalk plows broke.
Previous city snow clearance budgets had no concrete ceiling, allowing crews to petition for adjustments in the face of unusually hard winters like this one. This is not the case under the current budget.
Diane Holmes, Somerset Ward councillor, said snow removal has been a problem for the city this winter.
But she assured residents that there would be $52 million in the new budget for winter road maintenance, up from the approximately $50 million the city budgeted for 2004.
“It is quite clear that we made a major blunder with the Dec. 23 storm,” said Holmes.
The first ice storm of the season caught the city unprepared. City plows took several hours to respond to the dangerous road conditions, a fact which Holmes found “totally unacceptable.”
Holmes and John Manconi, the city’s acting director of surface operations, told residents that city workers will try to get trucks out sooner and working on all snow-covered or icy roads, instead of only ones along major transit routes.
Gordon Diamond, director of Transit Services, said services would be greatly increasing in the next 20 years. OC Transpo plans to increase from three trains to 105 and from 900 to 2,000 buses. The goal is to have 30 per cent of the population using the system by 2025, instead of the current 17 per cent.
“I think the city is headed in the right direction,” said Diamond. “They are beginning to put back some of the money they took away in the last budget. They realized that they cut services too much.”
The new budget includes a 15-cent cash fare increase for OC Transpo services, which Diamond said was necessary to keep up with inflation. Diamond said that without an increase in things such as transit fares, service charges and taxation, the city would spend an extra $65 million a year from inflation costs.
Less welcome proposals, such as increases in user fees and service charges for public swims, ice rentals and summer camp programs, were also discussed.