New transportation plan shy on funding

And a wary Tom Jackson raises another question-mark: The Doug Ford factor

Old dogs may not be good at learning new tricks, but long-serving city councillors are.

Faced with a new staff report intended to steer Hamilton’s transportation decisions to 2031 and beyond, city councillors parked their approval until staff return with a plan spelling out how the projects will be paid for.

To keep the canine analogy going, it’s a case of once bitten, twice shy.

The report in question is the longawaited, long-delayed Transportation Master Plan (TMP), a 159-page document that sets out to align the city’s transportation systems to the goal of a healthy, safe and prosperous community.

The report looks at, among many others things, public transit, roads, one-way street conversions, bike lanes, complete streets, pedestrian safety, traffic calming measures and data collection.

All in, there are 71 recommended short-, medium- and long-term actions.

It was Coun. Chad Collins who first raised a cautionary flag about approving the report before a financial plan is in place to keep a lid on public expectations.

But it was Tom Jackson, Hamilton’s longest-serving councillor, whose wariness brought to mind the image of a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Collins noted that councillors have previously adopted similar large documents only to be faced with “sticker shock” when projects that hadn’t been highlighted suddenly emerge to leave council scrambling to find ways and means to fund them.

“And then we almost paint ourselves into a corner because there are ofttimes advocates in the community for those projects, and when we say that it’s an affordability issue, then we’re criticized for not moving ahead with the plan fast.”

Quite wisely, Collins suggested staff develop a financial plan for TMP initiatives, dividing them into a list of what’s achievable based on current capital and operational budgets and a supplemental list in case of windfalls like federal grants.

To hammer home the point, Jackson conjured up memories of the 2001 Solid Waste Management Plan, another comprehensive report that featured lots of recommendations. That plan became the road map for developing and expanding Hamilton’s blue box and green cart recycling programs, waste diversion targets and a continuous improvement philosophy, setting the stage for future debates over garbage bag limits and illegal dumping.

Jackson noted that when councillors balked at the cost of some of those initiatives, the fact they had approved the plan as a whole was thrown back at them.

Not this time, the east Mountain councillor said in an interview after the meeting.

“It’s a lesson from years past,” Jackson said, adding he not only wants to see a TMP financial plan, he needs more time to “digest” the report.

“I just want to make sure that at the end of the day, if I support this TMP, are there any (unexpected) consequences. Have I locked myself into future things that ‘shall’ be done up on the east Mountain that my constituents may not necessarily want, though some downtown neighbourhoods may have pleaded for.”

By and large, the TMP seems to be “downtown-centric” to Jackson. “Once you get past the core it’s a different world,” he says.

His overall wariness couldn’t have been any plainer than when he was asking staff questions.

Why, Jackson wanted to know, did staff describe LRT and the 2013 Rapid Ready Report on rapid transit as successes?

Surely, he said, those are works in progress “however they may end up.”

And when staff refer to partnerships with the province and Metrolinx, what would happen to Hamilton’s plans if, hypothetically, the new Conservative government dissolved Metrolinx?

Is there a backup plan “in light of the new ideology at Queen’s Park?”

Obviously, Jackson was thinking of the potential impact of premier-elect Doug Ford’s campaign promise to let Hamilton spend the $1 billion for LRT on other infrastructure projects.

He was just too circumspect to say it aloud.