Man bites meter

On December 5th, I wrote about a transportation consultation/survey that I attended at Ottawa City Hall. In the entry I mentioned that answers given by the downtown core attendees seemed to be unanimous that the cure to Ottawa's transportation woes was to charge road tolls and higher parking fees to those gas guzzling, pollution spewing, grid-lock causing commuters that drove in from the (ugh) suburbs.

Guess what, the city is raising parking fees to $3/hour and eliminating free parking at meters for weekends and evenings. You would think that the centre town folks would be ecstatic including their generally left of centre politicians.

But no. Clive "I cycle to work" Doucet calls it a bone head move. "It's out of control," bellows he. He argues that parking meters were intended to keep traffic moving. His logic befuddles the best of us. I thought that Clive had always told us that we needed public transit to keep the traffic flowing.

"People are just not going to come downtown," cries Diane Holmes. George Bedard calls it "negative, bull-headed". He goes on to say, "If they want to kill downtown, they're certainly doing it."

I have a solution. Just eliminate those pesky polluting buses from the downtown core. They just impede traffic flow when I am looking for a parking spot. Plus those darn bus stops take up so much prime parking space on the roads. Finally, we subsidize the transit system to the tune of 50% of the cost to run it. Take the savings from the bus system and plough it into subsidized parking fees.

Hey, who says that the suburbanites can't come up with ideas for the urbanites?

Give me a call sometime, Clive... we'll do tofu!

Big tax increases to come

Hey, you heard it here first!

There is a note on the MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation), the folks who establish the value of your property for municipal tax purposes, web site that reads:

"The assessment update of all properties in Ontario was cancelled for 2006 and 2007... Although the assessment updates for 2006 and 2007 have been cancelled, MPAC continues to inspect properties, update values and improve the accuracy of its information."

That means that our city councillors are going to stick us with a minimum 4.9% (probably about 6% when the dust settles) municipal tax increase in 2008 based on 2005 assessment values.

MPAC will report the updated assessments in 2008. You can expect that assessments, based on real estate sales reports over the past 2 years, will have increased by a minimum of 10 or 20%. Therefore, if your home is worth the Ottawa average of $250,000, your taxes will rise by about $400 in 2009.

That's a 15% increase in revenue without even changing the tax rate!

So here is the bottom line as I see it. City Council will bite the bullet in 2008 with a whopper of a tax increase (largest in their history) that will raise your taxes by about $180. Then in 2009 and possibly 2010, due to increased assessments from MPAC, they will freeze taxes at zero percent...

Just in time for the next election!

Je me souviens!

Damn, I missed a meeting with Maria McRea

Ward 16 Councillor McRea held a town hall meeting this week to discuss the widening of Prince of Wales Avenue from Woodroffe to Fisher. I wanted to go but got held up at work. Was I working late, you might ask? No, Councillor McRea meeting to get citizen's input was at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Good timing if you want to hear from the mases. Even better timing if you don't!

I wanted to bring to Maria's attention the fact that, if you twin Prince of Wales up to Fisher Ave, you do not clear up traffic problems... you just move them around. Also, if you drive the Prince of Wales traffic on to Fisher Avenue, the increased traffic passes by, or close to, four... count them... four schools, including three junior schools. This is a tragedy waiting to happen.

The problem with the whole mess is that it is a half-assed planning job. You twin Prince of Wales to Fisher but not the rest of the way to Baseline Road. As a result, you will move the traffic onto Fisher, which is a four lane road, but when they get to Dynes Road they get funnelled back into two lanes until they hit Baseline. Then they go back to two lanes through the Experimental Farm all the way to Carling Ave.

Sorry I did not make the meeting, Maria. Maybe next time you can make it at 10:30 when I take my coffee break.

I hope that you take note of my concern.