From My Bottom Step

Earlier this evening, In a nailbiter, London City Council responded to the snowclearing request by White Oaks mums by approving it as a pilot project this winter.

The odds were all against it.

First it had to get leave to be discussed. And then it had to survive an attempt to get it deferred for consideration several months down the road. And then it had to survive a final vote.

Added 2008//12/02. This is an important issue and I’ll continue to add content to the article as time permits:

Ward 1 Councillor, Roger Caranci, wasted no time trying to delay the request until it could be discussed as part of the budget process. And in order to try and achieve that, Councillor Caranci tried to downplay the unique nature of the way that the White Oaks neighbourhoods were designed around a park system that connects everything together:

It seems as though it’s something that many people in the community are looking for… Mr. Leckie said that this is possibly a unique pathway… There was one particular pathway that I used to get calls on all the time…and that was in the Argyle area… I don’t doubt that there are many others in every ward that we have throughout the city… We all have challenges in this respect.

I agree that there are pathways all over the city that deserve to be better maintained by the city. But there always has to be a start somewhere, and there will always be those councillors who do everything that they can to prevent that start from taking place. White Oaks was wonderfully designed around it’s greenspace, and for that reason it’s a logical place for a pilot project to take place.

Effectively, Councillor Caranci’s motion to delay the request was an attempt to kill it. And alternative transportation advocates in London should remember that come the next election.

Councillor Lonc:

As usual, very little to say. He simply agreed with the pretense that the White Oaks pathways shouldn’t be considered in isolation.

Controller Gord Hume:

I don’t support what they’re after for the simple reason that it’s setting a precedent that we will regret. Every neighbourhood in this city has got paths and pathways that people want ploughed… You should be very cautious on this, because once you open this door I don’t think you’ll ever close it again. And I think the costs are immense.

Controller Barber:

I thought that $25,000 sounded rather high for 20 snow events. That’s more than $1,000 per snow event… That’s why we need a pilot study, to see how much it would cost and how we can best undertake it… We just decided to continue to spend over $3 million each and every year on subsidies for industrial and we’ll probably hear about more subsidies to come… This seems to me like a rather false economy…

Give me a break. If Mr. Hume wants to talk about huge costs, then let’s talk about how much money it costs (directly and indirectly) to support automobile transportation.

Controller Barber:

We have a situation where there isn’t the walkability that we keep talking about.

Exactly right. That’s the bottom line. There’s been years of posturing about alternative transportation by local politicians and it’s way past time that they started to put some money where their collective mouth is!