Sunday, September 25, 2011

Victoria looks to Saanich for help meeting carbon-neutral deadline


Victoria needs Saanich to help with meeting a carbon-neutral deadline.

Mayor Fortin is quoted as saying “Why wouldn’t we be doing what Saanich does?

This says it all.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amalgamation is a TERRIBLE idea. Halifax did it and the results are dismal. Taxes in the city are enormously high which help pay for low taxes in the rural areas where roads, sewage and garbage collection cost much more due to distance and few users. It creates an imbalanced tax base with even more imbalanced services.

James Legh said...

Halifax is only one place that was amalgamated and it seems to be the poster city for anyone who feels amalgamation is bad. However, did you know that they spend over $1.5 million a year on salt alone? Why, because they have significant costs due to the weather and resulting maintenance to roads, snow removal etc. They operate their own transit system. They use the RCMP. They also have different tax rates in rural areas compared to urban areas. The point here is that they are a different city with different requirements. I am not saying that we will save money, I am saying we will have a better government and a better community for us all.
I should also remind everyone that it may not be best to amalgamate all 13 cities into one. Perhaps 2 or 3, which might then account for the rural/city split (such as it is).

James said...

Dean Fortin is a nice man, but he's a misguided muppet as a politician. Face it, the only thing amalgamation would accomplish for most of the smaller municipalities is that they would have the dubious pleasure of helping to pay for Victoria's white elephant new blue bridge. Victoria council needs to realize that socialism seems real great... until you run out of other peoples' money.

Anonymous said...

Halifax is NOT the only city that people use to talk about how badly an amalgamated city runs. Look at Ottawa. It is DISMAL. Same issues as "Anonymous" wrote about above (i.e., imbalanced tax base with imbalanced services). Your argument for amalgamation seems to run on the platform of "better governance" but you have not provided any sense of what that actually means.