Interesting read in the TJ this morning. The Mayor, after posting a very conciliatory facebook open letter yesterday, appears to have returned to her old spend spend spend agenda from pre-election days.
Her priorities are contradictory. The commitment to Senior’s housing is interesting. But if it is going to be more than sloganeering, then the Mayor elect needs to realize that more than half of Rothesay’s residents are seniors and their concern is affordable housing. That means holding the line on costs.
Seniors who live in their own homes are living on fixed incomes that don’t increase when spendthrift councils raise taxes. Seniors, more than anyone are being squeezed by higher and higher property tax bills and fees for water and sewer, the result of runaway town spending.
If the Mayor pushes council into a new round of discretionary spending with higher taxes to pay for it and if that makes seniors’ homes unaffordable, then her commitment to them will have been worthless.
From the TJ article, it appears that her cover now is that she has a mandate from voters “for growth”.
Well what can we draw that from Monday’s election result?
As the Mayor doesn’t normally have a vote, we counted the votes cast for council. – The four Councillors who ran on a “let’s build a new arena” platform received a total of 8997 votes on May 9th. The candidates who ran on a “Let’s renovate the existing Arena” platform got 9,119 votes.
If you remove Peter Lewis’ votes from the equation (He opened the door to either new or renovation at the all-candidates meeting), then those who ran specifically for a new Arena represent only 7016 votes.
In other words, if the council vote was a plebiscite for a new arena, then the renovate option beat the new by a healthy 57% to renovate versus a mere 43% for new.
Regardless, the new Arena hinges on provincial approval of $4 – 5 million in RDC grant money that hasn’t been forthcoming from either the Alward or Gallant governments. Sources acknowledge that application from Rothesay for arena money was dead on arrival two years ago and is beyond revival without devine intervention.
The Federal Government will not poney up its share either. The previous MP only confirmed that the town could use the gas tax money it had already accumulated for road repair as the federal share. That, however, only represents half what the Town would need from the Feds in any case.
So, the new arena option doesn’t have overwhelming public support and neither does the tax increase of 8 cents or more to pay the town’s share of borrowing. This project is, as I’ve said before, is as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.
So let’s stop trying to revive a dead bird and move on now and fix the existing Arena so our kids can have decent dressing rooms and the public can have a facility they can take some pride in.