Your Neighbourhood

Traffic and the state of the roads are what comes up most here.

Streets should be built for the people who live on them, not for the people driving through to somewhere else. Easy to get in and out of, hard to cut through.

There is more to traffic calming than speed bumps and bollards. How wide the road is, where the sidewalk runs, what a driver can see ahead: all of that decides how fast people actually drive, and it holds up better than a sign does.

A lower speed limit is coming to residential streets across the city. A sign changes what is legal. It does not change what feels natural to drive, and that is the part the design has to do.

On the roads themselves, maintenance is falling behind. We need to keep up, and you need to know when the work is coming to your street. What I would do about that is in Roads, Pipes and Sidewalks.

A neighbourhood should be easy for the people who live there to get in and out of, and hard to cut through. I have said that for years, and it applies to every neighbourhood in Ward 12.

When development reaches Maley Drive, we need strong meandering between Maley and Lasalle. That is what the neighbourhood is asking for, along with traffic calming and sidewalks to bring the width of the road down.

The meandering is in the draft Official Plan. It is not in force. Phase One of this Official Plan review came into effect in April 2019. Phase Two, the phase that carries the Montrose alignment, is still a draft seven years later. Council has not adopted it, and once council does, the province still has to approve it.

So the thing neighbours are counting on is sitting in a document nobody has finished. Getting it adopted with those rules intact is the job.

I have worked on Official Plan amendments and on neighbourhood specific master plans. I understand the process, and I understand what it costs when it is not done right.

Ward 12 needs a councillor who understands how cities function under provincial rules, and who brings something like this to you before it is locked in and there are shovels in the ground. So roads get designed the way the neighbourhood expects. So the long fights people in the Montrose area have already had are settled before a developer starts drawing a map.

I am here to get you this information when it matters, which is early.

Flooding in the Flour Mill has been a problem for decades. The work that fixes it is unglamorous: maintaining the storm sewers and the roads so water moves away from houses instead of building up inside them.

The Junction Creek work is well underway and it is turning into a beautiful park. We need to finish it.

Getting ahead of this is cheaper and it works better. You should get the neighbourhood you expected when you invested in your home, without spending years fighting for it.

Maintenance that gets done before it is urgent is the whole argument in Roads, Pipes and Sidewalks.

These are some of the original neighbourhoods that make up this community. They have their own flair, their historical homes, and a high density of schools.

What people here are asking for is safe streets. For themselves, and for the people facing housing issues. Both.

Where I stand on that is in Homelessness, Addiction and Safety.

Those schools are an opportunity. I want to work with them, across all of Ward 12, on a ward specific youth council that also takes part in the youth council created last term, which I supported and lobbied for.

Getting young people involved in improving their own neighbourhoods builds a city they want to live in while they study, or come back to when they are done.

These two neighbourhoods both border downtown. A revitalized downtown does not stop at its own edge, it spreads outward, into here. I have been a long champion of downtown, and I am excited to extend that into their backyards.

People here bought into a subdivision expecting single family homes in the next phase. A quiet neighbourhood, low traffic, and streets sized for the kind of development they were shown.

What came forward instead was a proposal for three nine-storey apartment buildings.

Residents organized. They filed a detailed objection, they packed the planning committee, and they made their case. Council approved it anyway.

That is what it looks like to end up somewhere other than the neighbourhood you expected when you invested in your home.

The planning approval has happened. The site plan has not. Council is not the approval authority on a site plan, which is exactly why the conditions that protect a neighbourhood have to be written in earlier, in the Official Plan and the zoning, where a councillor does have a vote.

I am here to make sure the residents' concerns are met. Ambulance access, safe water pressure, safe roads, and transit access for a building geared to seniors are not wants. They are needs, and I will work to make sure they are delivered.

Getting ahead of it is the point. The city and the developer should be delivering the neighbourhood you expected when you invested in your home, not something you find out about once it is built.

Beyond the issues every part of this city is dealing with, Minnow Lake has a serious rat problem.

Council has directed staff to act, and a longer term plan is still being drafted. Residents are living with it now. What is needed is a comprehensive plan to stop the spread and get it cleaned up, moving at the speed people are actually dealing with this, not a response handled one complaint at a time.

A large portion of Minnow Lake residents are in Ward 11. I am here to work with you and with the candidates in Ward 11, to make sure the Ward 12 section is heard and is part of the solution to this issue.

In the early 2000s the city moved away from removing snow and toward maintaining it. We need to move back.

Sidewalks that people depend on go uncleared. Snow builds up on cul de sacs until residents cannot get into their own homes.

The objection to removal is always the cost. That objection counts one side only. Not removing snow has its own bill, and we have been paying it ever since.

We use more sand and salt. We lose the use of our own streets, with lanes and parking buried for months at a time. On commercial streets it costs businesses trade, and that works through into property values. And it raises our liability, because snowbanks are where people slip and fall.

None of that arrives as a line item called snow. It arrives everywhere else. That is the false saving I set out in A problem vs the root of the problem.

Removing the snow also changes how we build. Our roads are built extra wide to store snow. Take the snow away and they do not need to be.

A narrower road is cheaper to maintain. Less asphalt to buy, fewer places for a pothole to start, slower traffic, and room left over for sidewalks.

Lighting on a lot of our sidewalks is sparse, and people feel it is too dark to walk at night.

In a winter city, night does not wait for the evening. The sun is down before five for months at a time, and that is not late. That is people walking the dog, and walking home from school with their kids.

Where people are actually out walking, the light has to reach the sidewalk and not just the road. So that people can see what is around them, and so that drivers can see them.

Parks and local amenities should be built for the needs of the neighbourhood they sit in. Walking Ward 12, it is obvious that what residents want changes from one section to the next.

My goal is participatory budgeting across the city, so residents have a real say in what happens in their own neighbourhood.

If that does not happen, the work does not stop. I will go to the neighbourhood associations and make sure they get that say, and I will go further than that, looking for additional dollars from sponsors and from local businesses, so we can build the kind of neighbourhoods this area is proud of.

I am here to be your chief connector. Making sure residents know when decisions are happening, and feel welcome being part of making them.

When we work together we build the things that actually get used. That creates pride in a neighbourhood, and that pride draws in more partners and delivers better results. It is also how a city holds on to people and attracts investment, which is the case I make in Becoming the city of first choice.

The needs and wants of the neighbourhood are the priority. That is the job.