From My Bottom Step

This is what the Mayor had to say at Monday’s meeting about this week’s recognition of Ward Three’s Bernie MacDonald:

There’s a special recognition of one of our own that I wanted to your attention.

The 2009 Ontario West Municipal Conference is being held with the partnership of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. And one of the things they do is they look for members of Council that are long-serving. And one of our own, Councillor Bernie MacDonald, is going to be recognized, and is the recipient of the 25 Year Longstanding Service Award that’s going to be presented by the Housing Minister, Jim Watson.

Part of his submission and what went toward getting his nomination included his work on the Board and several committees of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities as well as his long-standing service on items like the impact of urban grafitti and how we need to improve that (and I think that’s a program that we started through Jay Stanford’s area), as well as his position (and London’s position) on the harm of smoking in motor vehicles with children present. And lastly, his championing of the North London Optimist Community Centre.

So that’s just a few of the things. But one thing that I thought was interesting was that when he started as a Councillor in 1980 there were only 150,000 people in the City of London and the tallest downtown building was just 12 stories high. And we’ve certainly come a long way on that. So on behalf of the Council, Bernie, congratulations and well done.