Punch drunk councillors wrangle over SoBi
Exhausted and deeply divided council rejected a motion to pump $400K into the bike-share program to keep it afloat
Apparently the old Latin saying “in vino veritas” — meaning that truth comes out in wine — has its counterpart when Hamilton city councillors are weary and punch drunk.
After a gruelling 16-hour meeting that ended in a three-hour-plus debate over what to do with the abandoned SoBi bike program, fatigued councillors were suddenly saying what they really thought about things.
Some of those personal verities may not bode well for future working relationships.
The debate over SoBi hit like a bolt from the blue after Uber Inc. recently and unceremoniously broke its contract with the city, leaving the widely used bike sharing program without an operator.
In the clamber to find a solution, tempers frayed, verbal jabs were exchanged and sarcastic comments flew.
In the end, council narrowly rejected a proposal to pump $400,000 of city money into the program to keep it alive until a new operator can be found. That motion by Nrinder Nann and Jason Farr lost on an 8-8 tie vote.
As a fallback, council voted to take the bikes off the road and store them while staff searches for a new
white knight. But not before the debate laid bare several personal, geographic and ideological fault lines that revealed council’s deep divisions, some of which go back to the beginning of the term.
Major Fred Eisenberger, who strongly supported Nann’s temporary solution, acknowledged as much as the bitter Wednesday debate dragged on past midnight Thursday.
“I think there’s much more going on here than Uber bike, which I think is unfortunate,” Eisenberger said.
He’s right. But it didn’t speak well for Eisenberger’s leadership on such a hot issue that he was unable to line up at least one more vote to tip the balance in favour of Nann’s motion, especially since it seemed like a little friendly off-line persuasion might have done the trick.
Be that as it may, the long day and late hour clearly took its toll on Eisenberger as well as others. How else to explain his slap-happy comment about the city and council he leads?
“It’s so Hamilton to say we want it for nothing,” he groused, not once but twice, in reference to the city’s penchant for expecting others to pay the full freight for transportation systems like SoBi and LRT.
It might be true, but it wasn’t exactly a sagacious mayoral moment. In essence, the debate boiled down to two viewpoints.
One side supported spending up to $400,000 as an interim measure to keep SoBi an active mobility option for the 26,000 cyclists who pay its membership and user fees, identified by staff as the lowest in North America.
The other side was dead-set against spending municipal dollars on a program which, when it was launched in 2015 with provincial dollars, swore it would never need to ask for them.
It didn’t help that the shortterm bailout proposal landed during the COVID-19 pandemic which has blown a gigantic hole in city revenues and left it facing a potential $60-million deficit.
Speaking against Nann’s funding motion, Chad Collins griped that taking on new costs and spending money it doesn’t have has almost become a “hallmark” of this council.
“We’re financially adrift right now and as a collective we are fiscally leaderless and completely out of touch with what going on around us,” Collins said.
On the other side of the divide, Maureen Wilson argued the city is in a fiscal crisis because of decisions made by this council and the two that preceded it.
“We’ve mortgaged our future on capital projects that are never going to pay back, they’re never going to make money and that’s why we’re in a financial crisis.”
Fortunately, there was some low comedic relief along the way. Tyro councillor John-Paul Danko angrily demanded an apology from Terry Whitehead for allegedly saying he had no “backbone.” Whitehead actually said “background.”
The split encompassed more than money, however. Some clearly resent the fact SoBi is largely a downtown-centric program that disregards the Mountain and suburbs.
The issue also highlighted the simmering political antagonisms between some old hands and new brooms Nann, Wilson and Danko, which began way back with their criticisms over the structure of the search committee for a new city manager.
In the final analysis, the acrimony and tension was clearly intensified by the inhumane length of the meeting. Which only goes to show that time management is not a strong suit on either side of the great divide.
Eisenberger, Nann, Wilson, Danko, Farr, Brad Clark, Maria Pearson and Arlene VanderBeek voted for the funding.
Collins, Sam Merulla, Tom Jackson, Esther Pauls, Lloyd Ferguson, Terry Whitehead, Judi Partridge and Brenda Johnson voted against it.