If re-elected, I intend to advocate for:

• Increasing opportunities for the public to learn about City processes and have meaningful input into Council decisions. Including regular “lunch and learns” where residents can sit with staff members to learn and ask questions about City programs and departments.

• Continued focus on delivering City Services more efficiently.

• Refining the use of Priority Based Budgeting to make sure that City funding is going to high priority programs and services.

• Creating a Benefit Based Procurement policy to enable City capital spending to provide better benefits to our local community and economy. Ideas within this policy may include a requirement to source locally when legally allowed to do so, and incentivizing some City Contractors to hire people with barriers to employment.

• Council to undertake Service Level Reviews of highest cost programs to make sure that community needs are being properly balanced with fiscal realities.

• Continuing investments in roads to catchup on traditionally underfunded Road Rehabilitation work. Creating a fiscal plan to properly maintain our storm water infrastructure.

• Commissioning an independent study to benchmark City salaries against comparable positions in the private and non-profit sectors and other government organisations. An Executive Summary of this study should be publicly released. In the community and at Council, I’ve heard lots of conversations about staff compensation. We should be sure to base these discussions on facts and data, not anecdotes.

• Reducing the residential property tax burden by increasing other revenue sources, including adopting a Storm Water Utility model. A priority for our residents is having property taxes more in line with other cities. This requires controlling our expenses. But it also means expanding our revenue opportunities. Comparatively, our non-tax revenue is lower than other jurisdictions. To get our taxes more inline without gutting services, this needs to be addressed.

• The City and County are currently in provincially mandated arbitration. It will assign cost sharing based on the services each municipality delivers to residents of the other municipality. Any money the City receives through this process should be put toward tax relief, not increased services.

• Building partnerships with the County and other municipal partners to better deliver services. Since an arbitrated agreement will remove conversations about sharing costs for existing services from the table, our next City and County Councils will have a unique opportunity to strengthen their working relationship.