Greg Thompson For Ward 4

In addition to the core commitments I have made in My Agenda, there is a great deal more I wish to contribute to our city as your councillor for Ward 4. Following is the thinking I bring to some issues vital to the future of our city.

Just as cities are the engines of regional and national economies, neighbourhoods are the building blocks of cities. We’re all Londoners, but most of us have our strongest attachment to the streets where we live, where our children walk to school, where we socialize with our neighbours...

Neighbourhood issues are mostly city-level ones – roads, schools, traffic, sewers, by-law enforcement. It’s in our neighbourhoods where we most often decide whether the City is or isn’t working for us.

Healthy and safe neighbourhoods don’t just happen. They need the right mix of the right things. The least the City must offer them are:

A strong service ethic by civic employees. As the “go-to” person for many years in my neighbourhood, I hear far too often from people who’ve had no real response when they took their questions or problems to City Hall. A central service desk that gets all calls, routes them to the proper department and then follows up with both parties until the question is answered or the problem resolved is one way we could ensure a strong service ethic by City staff.
Faster response to complaints about property standards and other by-law enforcement issues. If there aren’t enough enforcement officers to make sure our neighbourhoods are kept clean and residents are protected, I’ll urge staff to see where department costs can be cut so that more can be hired.
I’ve made a commitment as part of my agenda for the next term of council to demand real community policing. Neighbours working together will always be a key part of keeping our neighbourhoods safe but we must be able to count on the local police to commit the resources required to make sure that the streets are safe, especially in those parts of Ward 4 that have a high incidence of street crime.
Resources to do things for themselves. It doesn’t always have to be money. Advice and support from knowledgeable City staff is sometimes all that’s needed. One low-cost, locally-driven project that I know personally – and it is only one of many across the city - is the development of a plan to discourage speeding and careless driving on Old East Village streets. No-one knows better than the people who live on neighbourhood streets where the traffic problems are, and how to fix them. Where it takes money to carry out neighbourhood initiatives that improve our quality of life, I’ll make it a priority to find the necessary resources.
Transparency and accountability. These are more than just buzz words. They mean making sure that people can find out what’s really going on and whom to hold responsible. I will develop a structure that allows information, opinions and strategies to be shared quickly and to flow both ways. I will use the new social media and I will hold open “town hall” meetings at least once a year, where important ward and city issues can be discussed. My work in Old East Village over the past decade would have been made so much easier if previous councillors had committed to being available and accessible to us.
Proper maintenance of city-owned properties. It doesn’t encourage residents to look after their own homes and yards when weeds flourish on City lands and broken windows go un-replaced in City buildings.
Effective action on street-level drug dealing, prostitution, and youth gangs. In addition to real community policing, there are strategies that have proven effective in other cities. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. For example, in some cities, all cases from a given neighbourhood are assigned to the same crown attorney. That way, they become much more aware of the underlying issues in the neighbourhood and the people who often cycle through the courts. They can be much more sensitive to carrying out prosecutions in constructive and productive ways. Of course, it is often people in these neighbourhoods who know best what can and needs to be done. This can be illustrated with an example from my neighbourhood. We worked with the Salvation Army to develop a “John School”, a strategy that has had great success in many other larger cities. It is a testament to the inertia on street crime issues in our ward that neither the police nor the courts, as far as I’m aware, have yet to divert a single offender to the program.

These are some of the things I want to work on, in partnership with the people of Ward 4. Building neighbourhoods with value, neighbourhoods that are safe and healthy, is something I’ve had great success doing in my neighbourhood, and I’ve been at it for a long time. The lessons I’ve learned here, from actually doing the hard work that is necessary if we wish to improve our neighbourhoods, is part of the skill-set I will be taking to the Council table.

Find me a taxpayer in the city of London who isn’t concerned about rising municipal taxes and I’ll show you someone who is living a very privileged life. Most of us do care. Our tax load is sufficient to cause many of us worry. And for those on a fixed income, or working part-time or at minimum wage in the service economy, the tax load is sufficient to cause significant financial hardship. How is our money being spent? Are good spending decisions being made? Could we do more with less?

Taxes are a necessary part of living in a civilized society. We must never forget, though, that there is only one taxpayer. Downloading or uploading between various levels of government makes little difference when the bills are being paid by the single taxpayer.

While there will always be disagreement among citizens with particular spending decisions made by our elected representatives, most of us understand that the city must use public monies to provide municipal services. We need to be constantly assured, however, that our tax dollars are being spent as wisely and efficiently as possible; that the policies and programs and capital investments being made with our tax dollars make sense; and, that these investments have the net effect of improving our quality of life, thereby making the city more competitive and able to attract new jobs.

In the medium- to long-term, all three levels of government are going to have to more clearly define their roles and responsibilities and ensure that tax dollars are re-apportioned to reflect these areas of responsibility. The sharing of the gas tax with municipalities has helped, and there has been some uploading of the costs of some social programs by the province.

The city of London must not use these negotiations to justify poor spending decisions now, or allow the deferred maintenance on our urban infrastructure to accumulate in the hope that a newer “new deal for cities” will come our way to solve this problem. While we received a bit of a reprieve with the 2010 Stimulus Spending package in the city, we must not allow this to justify the sound management of our limited municipal resources now.

Significant municipal tax increases drive business opportunities and jobs away. The city must remain competitive – regionally, nationally, even globally. These tax increases create economic hardship for residents with fixed or low incomes. We must never forget that one in twelve of us in London live at or below the poverty line.

Taxpayers are not ATM machines, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Municipalities have limited financial resources and each and every tax dollar must be treated as a scarce resource.
As your councillor, I will work to:

Here in London, across Canada and around the world, it’s the same story – the economy is changing. Don Drummond, the chief economist at TD Bank and an outspoken commentator on the competitiveness of the Ontario economy, has made the point many times that Ontario risks being left behind without radical restructuring. Gone are the days of an undervalued Canadian dollar, cheap energy and free and unfettered access to the U.S. market. But, because our local economy is subject to the great forces now loose in the world, we can’t throw in the towel. We have a responsibility to each other, and to those who will come after us, to do the best we can to position our city in such a way as to benefit as the economy changes.

We need to do much more to build a vibrant, first-class city in which Canadians, including immigrants, want to live. We need to do much more to ensure that our major export to the rest of the world isn’t our best and brightest, that our children have the opportunity here in London to engage in challenging, meaningful work and new economy jobs.
Knowledge is now the key resource.

From 2004 to 2008 – even as the current recession took hold – London lost nearly 6,000 manufacturing jobs, 3,400 clerical jobs and 1,000 sales jobs for a total approaching 10,500 while gaining 1,300 professional, business and finance jobs, 2,500 teaching jobs and 3,200 jobs in applied and natural sciences for a total of 7,000. That’s a gap of more than 3,000 between what we’ve lost one the old-economy side and what we’ve gained in the job sectors of the future.
It we are going to catch up and keep up, City Council needs to act. It needs to act creatively and it needs to act now.

There’s a place in the mix for the traditional kinds of incentives to draw industry. There are still good-paying manufacturing jobs to be had. Rising energy costs will make global shipping much more expensive and remove the incentive for large companies to shift production to other parts of the world. We may see some companies come home. But in the new knowledge economy, it’s just as important to build quality of life.

Picture a liveable and sustainable city – a city with a lively downtown scene, with exciting public spaces, with all sorts of artistic, cultural and recreational opportunities, with a full range of housing choices.
This is a city that knowledge industries will come to because it’s the kind of city where its managers and workers will want to come and want to stay.
Building a liveable and sustainable city is also economic development. Indeed, it may be the most important kind of economic development.

Suburban development doesn’t pay for itself. Charges paid by developments and a slowly growing tax base aren’t enough to cover the real start-up costs of new roads, sewer and water systems, transit, fire and police protection, schools and the rest.

There’s sure proof in the way our tax bills keep climbing faster than inflation; in the way existing streets and sewers are allowed to fall into disrepair; in the way user fees are slapped onto more and more City services.

It’s the property owners and renters in Ward 4 and across the city who take up the slack while distant new suburbs get new service at bargain-basement prices.
Development and growth aren’t dirty words. Of course London must grow if it is to become a successful regional centre. London is projected to have an annual growth in population of about 1% over the next generation. This is slow growth, and it is a cause for concern. And of course we all have the right to live where we wish.

But if we choose to live on the outskirts, we ought to pay the full cost. The taxpayers of Ward 4 and other established parts of town must no longer be asked to pony up the difference.

What London needs is smart, financially responsible policies for growth and development. We need pay-as-you-go. full-cost planning, with development charges high enough to meet the full start-up costs. We don’t need policies that off-load any of these costs on the City taxpayer.

SPRAWL
Unbridled suburban growth imposes other costs too. It’s a primary cause of challenges we face in city finances, air and water pollution, energy waste, loss of woodlands and wetlands, the breakdown of community networks, and more.
It doesn’t have to be that way. . New developments can and should enhance our quality-of-life, preserve our natural environment and spare the public purse. If the development industry can be encouraged to preserve scarce public resources – land, materials, energy, environmental quality and physical infrastructure – our new neighbourhoods will be healthier places to raise our families, more diverse and liveable, and all taxpayers will pay less for them in the short- and long-term.

London’s economic and social well-being depends on the care we bring to our environments, both the environment that nature gave us and the environment that we’ve created with our homes, offices, factories and shops.

How do we get past planning and development policies that treat these environments as a problem instead of a chance to make healthy and distinctive communities? This is our challenge.

City Council and city planning staff need to answer some key questions. How can planning and development policies balance environmental protection with other key goals like attracting new people and industry? How can we prepare for a changing climate? How can we keep our heritage buildings without giving up options for adapting them, at an affordable cost, to new uses?

For OUR natural environment
These are some of the things that must be done to foster a healthy natural environment – healthy for us!

For OUR heritage assests
There are many practical things we can do to preserve our irreplaceable stock of distinctive older buildings.

London is a big city by Canadian standards, tenth biggest in the land. Yet we seem so afraid of being “ahead of the curve,” so afraid of breaking new ground, that much smaller cities seem progressive by comparison.
It often takes an outsider to see how special our natural and built environments are, and how much could be done with them. Larry Beasley is one. A world -class city planner, he remarked during a visit to London a few years ago that he wished he’d had the Thames River and our long stretches of heritage building to work with when he was given the job of remaking Vancouver.
It’s time we right here in London started showing this kind of vision.

A lively downtown is the mark of a successful city. Just as cities drive the economies of nations, downtowns are the economic engines of cities. Residents and visitors alike judge a city’s success by what they see there. A successful city has a bustling downtown where some people make their homes, many people go to work and everyone can find interesting things to do.

In London, taxpayers have pumped more than $200 million into the downtown in the last decade, starting with the new Covent Garden Market and work at Victoria Park in 1999-2000, continuing with work to dress up the Fork of the Thames, construction of the John Labatt Centre and the Central Library’s move to what is now the CitiPlaza. I’m one of those who believe that these were good investments, needed to start making downtown London a destination.

Of course the bulk of retail business, once a mainstay of downtowns everywhere, has moved to suburban malls and power centres, and this won’t change.

But downtowns still have a big role to play as destinations shared by people from every corner of the city and by visitors. Downtowns are for entertainment, offices and specialty shops. They’re for browsing, meeting friends, sitting on a patio watching the passing scene. They’re places with a range of housing options for those who want to stay close to the action.

Busy downtowns are also safe. Experts who study street crime agree – the strongest preventive medicine is passers-by who have the options of stepping in, calling police and being witnesses for the prosecution.
What about parking? Residents, workers and visitors all need places to park. But their needs must be balanced with the need to make downtown pedestrian-friendly. Too much emphasis on parking takes away from the biggest concern in revitalizing downtowns – creating places and spaces where people want to spend time.

Because a successful downtown is about people, not vehicles. Successful downtowns are full of public activity. Cafés need to be able to spill onto the sidewalk. There must be room to stop for a chat, to pause for a look in a shop window, to gather around buskers and street vendors. Successful downtowns celebrate diversity. They don’t try to micro-manage what is and is not allowed.
Here are some of the things we must do here in London.