Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act and municipal politics #nlpoli

You mean the Hell’s Angels won’t be deterred by a committee of people telling Doc O’Keefe what they think he should do?

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All they want is fairity #nlpoli

The people who run the province’s town and cites are looking to get a new financial arrangement from the provincial government.

Last week, the municipalities federation held an emergency meeting to discuss recent developments:

“What we’re asking government for today is very clear,” said Rogers. “Short-term help in this 2012 budget and a commitment to participation in the development of a long-term, strategic plan for the municipal sector.”

Sounds reasonable enough. 

Odds are they won’t get anything in the near term. Give a listen to what municipal affairs minister Kevin “Fairity” O’Brien said at the outset of an interview with On Point with David Cochrane this past weekend. O’Brien quickly started into a recitation of how much money the provincial government has spent since 2008 on municipal infrastructure and things like fire trucks. he finishes off with the warning that any new financial arrangement has to be sustainable for taxpayers.

Coming from a guy who has helped boost provincial government spending to irresponsible, unsustainable heights without a toss about such ideas, those words sound a bit like a lead bell.  

O’Brien is using coded language.

What he really was telling municipalities president Churence Rogers is a simple “f*ck off”.  No one should be surprised if Rogers has heard something along those lines over the past few weeks, perhaps even from O’Brien himself.  Maybe no one used the “f” word exactly, but language likely would have had the finger buried in it.

You see it all comes down to money, power and control.

Right now the provincial government has all of it.

And they will not give up any of it.

The provincial government isn’t interested in changing municipal funding at all.  Any change to funding would have to transfer some of the provincial cash or the ability to raise cash over to the towns and cities. 

If the province doesn’t have that cash, then it no longer has the power to control what goes on in the province.  Fairity O’Brien may not have deliberately mentioned infrastructure and fire trucks, but there’s no coincidence that he did.  That money and those items are part of the old pattern of politics in this province: patronage. 

And that’s the money, power and control we are talking about.

None of that has anything to do with the very serious problem in many towns and cities in the province but frankly provincial politicians like O’Brien don’t give a rat’s backside about that. 

Many parts of the province aren’t really doing all that well, despite the reports you may have heard.  They don’t have the municipal tax base to come up with the sort of cash of their own they need to put into road work, water and sewer projects and other infrastructure.

Problems in the fishery, the loss of paper mills have all taken their toll.  People may be working in Alberta and still living in Stephenville and Grand Falls-Windsor but it’s local companies that pay the taxes that help to keep the street lights on, quite literally.

What’s more, way too many of the towns on the island are full of retirees and not much else.  People on fixed incomes don’t have the ability to tax up the tax slack.  Those towns also have problems finding people to volunteer for municipal services like firefighting.

There’s a bit of a false impression of a boom in some places.  People in Grand Falls-Windsor thinks everything is smurfy.  Ditto Gander.  But in both these towns the major economic engine is the provincial government and a level of spending that we know is unsustainable. 

What’s more, the provincial government doesn’t pay taxes to municipalities.  They do – however – collect taxes on every municipal purchase through the harmonised sales tax (HST).  The effect is to claw back a portion of the money the province grants in the first place.  Until the fictitious oil royalty claw back, though, this one actually reduces the amount of money the towns and cities in the province have available to actually spend on services to residents.

And then when towns and cities go looking for cash, politicians like Kevin O’Brien start coming up with all sorts of excuses for why things must remain as they are.  The miserable, dark joke in all that shouldn’t be lost.  Towns and cities in the province are looking for a fair shake on provincial funding.  Kevin O’Brien is the guy who told us all that the province just wanted “fairity in the nation.”

David Cochrane exposed the fundamental bullshit of government’s position.  Cochrane asked why it was that O’Brien was talking about the impossibility of making commitments of funds for a few millions in the short term to towns and cities while government was prepared to forecast the price of oil for 55 years in order to justify Muskrat Falls.  All O’Brien had was talking points.

O’Brien also couldn’t explain or justify the four years that it has taken for O’Brien to start getting around to talking about a new financial arrangement for towns and cities.  Municipal leaders have asked for predictable funding.  All O’Brien has said is that he and his colleagues in government are willing to talk.

The real bottom line is that people like O’Brien who have politicized the purchase of bed pans and fire trucks simply want complete control over spending in the province for their own, pork-barrel, patronage reasons.

All municipal leaders want is fairity.

They aren’t going to get it from Kevin O’Brien.

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Are city councillors paid enough?

Debbie Hanlon doesn’t think so.

Residents of the city took pains to explain otherwise in the comments section of Monday’s Telegram story. Their comments make this story well worth reading.

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CB city council by-election down to five

cornerbrooker.com has a great little piece on the west coast city’s municipal by-election.

This leaves five candidates competing for one City Council seat: June Alteen, Gary Kelly, Trent Quinton, Tarragh Shanahan, and Alton Whelan.

Aside from some lawn signs, most candidates have been fairly quiet so far, however I think that Gary Kelly is at least proving that he’s visible and willing to work for the position. You may have seen him marching up and down O’Connell Drive in all sorts of nasty weather, or standing outside hockey games at the Pepsi Centre with his bright yellow campaign sign, waving as the cars head down the hill.

They mention that Gary also has a website and is using Twitter and Facebook.  That’s not surprising for a guy who was an early adopter to blogging  and who ran one of the best little gems of a blog in the process. A lot of politicians in the province could learn a lot of lessons from Gary.

For what it’s worth, Gary has the Bond Papers endorsement. Corner Brook readers of these e-scribblers would be well served if they voted for Gary in the by-election.

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Kiss it all good bye

Anyone hear any comments by the current St. John’s city councillors at how proud they were of the way the city looked in CBC’s Republic of Doyle?

Well, here’s what some of them told reporters, as presented in the Telegram:

“Republic of Doyle," a TV series that aired on CBC last week, received rave reviews from St. John's city councillors Monday.

"I didn't realize what a city I lived in, how beautiful it was," Coun. Gerry Colbert said. "When I look back on when I was a young fellow watching Magnum P. I., I used to say, 'God, I'd love to visit Hawaii, look at the shots of Hawaii, ' but I mean these shots, forget about the acting for a while, the shots that were taken were absolutely incredible."

Colbert said the show has gained popularity on the Internet and can be found on YouTube.

"We couldn't buy, in a million years, what that show gave us in one night," he said.

Mayor Dennis O'Keefe agreed that the city wouldn't be able to buy that kind of profile.

Coun. Debbie Hanlon and Coun. Sheilagh O'Leary also praised the show.

"It was fabulous, St. John's certainly looked gorgeous in it," Hanlon said.

"I was delighted," O'Leary said. "It was just fantastic."

Bet your last dollar that every single one of those councillors – except for Sheilagh O’Leary – is already sold on the idea of demolishing the downtown portion of St. John’s that provides much of the backdrop for the show.

You see every single city councillor – save O’Leary and maybe two others – is already on board with a plan by Fortis Properties to smash the existing municipal development plan and stick a 15 story high-rise on prime real estate on the waterfront.

It’s hard to imagine otherwise when you hear the mayor say absolutely asinine things like his line to local businessmen and women at a Rotary club that without development like Fortis is proposing, the city will have to rely on taxes to get its money.  

And if you listen to other councillors, it’s hard to imagine any of them standing in the way either.  There’ll be lots more talk about listening to the other side and about the need for development and progress.

That’s all just code for “I’ve already decided to vote for Fortis”. 

The crew at City Hall and their backers know how to talk out the clock.  They would like nothing better than an endless series of meetings and all sorts of hot air.  At the end, they’ll just vote the way they know right now that they will vote:  with Stan Marshall and his crowd.

Just remember what they did to people over the stadium, right down to the appeals farce.

Once the Fortis gig is done, then someone will file a proposal for the empty lot across Prescott Street from the current Fortis property.  This time they won’t try and conform to the old by-law like they sort-of did last time.  This time they’ll shoot for the stars.

And they’ll get that too.

Not long after there’ll be other plans. Other old buildings will be torn down because they are…well…old.

In place of these icky old things will rise the sort of architecture you see not in New York or Paris but in the true centres of modern civilization and culture.

Places like Mississauga or maybe Burlington.

Now this is not a lost cause by any stretch.  St. John’s city councillors are notoriously a pretty weak-kneed bunch. That’s why a few guys with imaginations as limited as their pockets are deep can win them over so easily.

But it’s going to take way more than a conversation or two in order to stop this proposal in its tracks.

Public meetings and letter writing won’t work much on them either. 

If people really don’t want to see the downtown turned into a carbon copy of a million other eyesores on the planet then they have to make it clear to each councillor that there is a huge political and maybe even a social or business price to be paid for what they are going to do. 

You see that’s the sort of stuff that is helping persuade them to vote with Fortis.  They are siding with their peeps.

So if you want them to shift positions, then sticking with their pals has to become painful.

Opponents of the plan need to consider some frank talk, some plain language.

Otherwise, kiss the whole of the downtown good bye and say hello to a cheap imitation of Scarborough.

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