City’s new budget brings 1.9% tax hike
Sudden fight over Alta Vista road project mars mayor’s perfect season
The delicate nature of the consensus Mayor Jim Watson has created around his annual budget plan was on display Wednesday at City Hall, as councillors spent about an hour arguing over just who was up to what, and a tiny road project in Alta Vista was pushed into the budget at the last minute.
The city budget is about $3 billion. The final version matches almost exactly the version Watson presented as a draft in early October: It includes a 1.9-per-cent tax increase, an average increase to transit fares of 1.9 per cent, and a hike in the price of city water and sewer service of seven per cent.
But it also includes $1.4 million to improve Lynda Lane, a short and uninhabited street that runs south off Smyth Road near the Alta Vista hospital complex, which includes The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
Most people know it best as a place to find short-term parking without having to pay $13 to stay on hospital grounds.
Despite being in an inner suburb, Lynda Lane is built to a rural-road standard: It’s two lanes wide, with dirt shoulders, drainage ditches and no lights. Adding a sidewalk and lights has been on the city’s to-do list for at least a decade and it was finally going to get done in 2014 until, deputy city manager Nancy Schepers swore, it was accidentally left off a list of 21 such projects, something nobody caught till the last minute.
For pedestrian safety, she said, “This is a big one. It really is a citywide facility that it connects to.”
The hospitals are big institutions that serve people from all over and Lynda Lane isn’t safe, Schepers said. She apologized Wednesday for leaving it out.
Watson, whose staff were supposed to go over the budget carefully, apologized, too.
He’s invested enormous political capital in his creation of a tidy, polite budget process, where he sets the terms and council changes little. It’s far better than the weeks of 14-hour meetings that used to characterize city budget debates, he says, where every council defended his or her pet project and taxes shot up three, four or five per cent to pay for them.
But then Lynda Lane came along, inserted at the last moment, and numerous councillors wanted to know just who was up to what.
“Sounds like queue-jumping to me,” said Coun. Diane Deans, leading off the attack. Even if it was left out by accident, where was it when council approved a new transportation master plan, just the day before, she asked.
Schepers explained that every single road-related project doesn’t get spelled out in the transportation master plan. It’s a big-picture document. This is an improvement to a small existing road. Deans recalled that city council voted not to improve Lynda Lane way back in 2003. What’s changed?
Treasurer Marian Simulik explained that it wasn’t cut from that year’s budget plan for transportation-reasons. That year, city council was scrounging money everywhere to try to hold off some of the worst effects of a big tax-policy change. “We were searching for crumbs in the cupboard,” she said. This was a crumb they found.
Coun. Jan Harder wanted to know why the Lynda Lane project is being paid for out of a fund reserved for “growth” projects. She represents Barrhaven. It’s got a ton of growth and not enough road money. Why is something in Alta Vista getting growth money? Because Lynda Lane is getting more and more traffic and citywide population growth is sending more people to the hospitals, Schepers said. Hardly anyone who uses the street is from Alta Vista.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to stick a new project into the budget, Coun. Rick Chiarelli said, but it really shouldn’t be done this way. There may be a good case for the Lynda Lane work, but let’s have it out at the transportation committee, he said, not sneak this thing in at the last second.
Alta Vista Coun. Peter Hume bridled at the idea that anybody was trying to be sneaky about anything. The project has been waiting to get going since 2003.
“It has been waiting for a budget allocation. Waiting patiently to receive its allocation,” he said. “All the T’s were crossed, all the I’s were dotted, and this has come up in the normal course of events.” Somebody just made a mistake. If they hadn’t, “This would have been buried in the deep bowels of the transportation capital budget and nobody would have said anything.”
Maybe he should have been pushier about getting it done sooner, he said.
Coun. Marianne Wilkinson said she has pedestrian routes in her Kanata North ward that could do with funding, too. Coun. Shad Qadri wanted to know if the plan includes parking meters (it doesn’t, Schepers said, but they’ll look at it). Coun. Tim Tierney said he was very concerned about the process here and questioned why the transportation committee hadn’t had a full debate on the idea (it didn’t spend a minute on the 21 projects on the list Lynda Lane was accidentally left off ).
Stop it, stop it, stop it, Watson finally said.
“Lynda Lane is an historical problem. It’s never been fixed,” he said. “There’s no sidewalks, there’s no lighting. Thousands of people are going to CHEO, the General.” This. Was. Just. A. Mistake. He whipped council to a vote and the councillors grumbled but fell in line.
As they did with the rest of the budget, approving the police, library, health, transit, planning and environment budgets without one question about any of them, and the finance and community-services budgets with just a couple. Various councillors’ efforts to get better food in day programs for the very poorest and to see whether there was any way to hold down the price of bus passes for the disabled came to nothing. The city might add funding for new crossing guards if we get to next summer and the transportation staff find some cash lying around they aren’t using.
Watson concluded by congratulating everyone involved in the budget, “the last of this mandate.”