News to laugh at

I read in this morning's Ottawa Citizen, a letter from a lady who lamented the raise in parking fees in Ottawa. She seemed quite elegant in the way she wrote but kinda blew her point with one comment. She claimed that the downtown was so quiet after working hours that "you could almost hear the dust blowing". Can you say Pulitzer?

Problem is that if the core is devoid of visitors now, how is a 50 cent/hour rise in rates going to kill it?

There are many other examples of overkill letters from earnest writers to the Citizen including a recent one wherein a gentleman was so fed up with a small OC Transpo increase, if I remember correctly it would cost him an extra $10-15 per month, that he was going out to buy a car (minimum of $10-20,000) and drive to work ($60/month for parking plus gas, insurance, repairs, etc) in protest. I suggest that he give up two of the lattes he buys each month to cover the OC Transpo increase and use the money he saves by not buying a car to pay for a badly-needed Economics 101 course.

Ottawa is not such a bad place to live. We grow at a rate of a couple of thousand persons per year, we build new housing, new schools and create jobs at a fair rate. The climate sucks in all but one season of the year and the streets are poorly maintained in winter but generally it is a great place to live.

Costs to run the city are going to rise with time. It is a fact of life in the big, well mid-sized maybe, city. Learn to live with it.

That is not too say that we can't do a better job in running this city. Notice that I said WE?! That's right, we run this city, not city council. They work for us! We hire them once every four years and can, and should, fire them if they screw up or let us down. If city council cannot balance a budget, make cuts to bureaucrats at city hall or put our fiscal house in order then we should fire them in one felled swoop in 2010.

But in the meantime, quit the sniping with the flawed logic.