Seems to me that the Mayors platform in the last election was to decrease costs by 10% across the board. This of course has not happened, and in fact if you look at all the increases in taxes, and service charges since the last election you will see that we have been nailed with substantial increases in all areas.

Put all the Municipal increases together with the increases in Hydro, ICBC, etc; and we have a serious problem. Especially for low income citizens, who have difficulty making all these additional payments.

The focus of the Mayor and the Finance Committee since the last election seems to be more about generating revenue for the City, than about reducing costs. In fact they would be hard pressed to show any reductions. The increases on the other hand seem to be coming in fast and furious.

It appears on the surface that the Mayor and a few Councilors have lost their way, and seem to have no ideas other than to increase costs to the citizens of Prince George. That is not a good recipe for the next election.

On the other hand the newer councilors seem to be getting it right, and are listening to the business community, and the citizens at large and are trying to do what is best for the total population as opposed to vested interest groups. Kudo’s to them. We need them to stay the course, and hold the line until the next election.

At the end of the day, the mayor only has one vote, just like any other councilor. As long as the others remain diligent, the harm proposed by Shari can be minimized to that of a blowhard mouthpiece. Not pleasant but doable.

Now is the time to start the process of identifying realistic candidates for the mayor’s chair for the next election and making sure all of the pieces are in place for an effective campaign.

I will go out on a limb and predicate that Scari Shari will not even run in the next election. Spoiled brats tend to take their toys and go home when others won’t play their game in the sandbox.

Good summary Peter. The special interest groups won yet again, and the taxpayers are the losers. Nothing new in this City.

As “anotherside” pointed out, the mayor has one vote.
PG voted to change the occupant of the mayor’s chair, but voted in all but one incumbent councilor. Has anything really changed? Are the residents any happier with Council. If we want meaningful change, then we need to change the face of Council and vote out the councilors that have occupied those positions term after term after term. Have the 3 new councilors done anything to distinguish themselves, or do they vote like sheep, only to flip-flop when the ire of electorate is raised?

According to city staff, figures for the amount of tax exemptions that can be granted to places of worship, non-profit organizations, private schools or other eligible tenants already exceeds the 1.5 per cent cap for all applicants.

Again, What the dickens is going on with this city and council? Was there not more than 1.2 million worth of exemptions brought forward that brought the percentage up last year to 1.54 instead of the 1.50 percent tax levy? Who knows what it is this year? City does not seem to want to give a figure out…..why so secretive?

This administration at city hall and council members are costing the taxpayers a heck of a lot of money….

How much have we paid in wasted administration costs in bylaws and planning? How much have we paid in legal costs due to these departments? How much is it going to cost taxpayers again for the next lawsuit slated to come up at the end of the month in Supreme court?

People really need to look at why bylaws and planning departments are not accountable for their jobs…… the way I look at it they also are partially to blame as they give the recommendations. So why did they give it in the first place for the paid parking?

I do not work for the city – I take that back I do – I am a taxpayer :P

I think experiences like this only harden the Mayor’s current stance, which is “change at any cost”. She’s looking to completely reorganize city operations, but doesn’t seem to truly evaluate the outcomes of such changes. She views dissention and public opposition as the biggest barrier to her work and has little respect for the public feedback process. Her gumption to make change happen is commendable, but her critical thinking and respect for public opinion is sorely lacking. Our Prime Minister suffers from the same attitude problem.

Jago for mayor ……

Politics in PG is never dull. One could argue that these “defeats” were a council that bowed to the will of the people.

Not for long or forcefully… but one could

JohnnyBelt. Can you be so kind as to tell us who, and what these special interest groups are that you are always referring to, and what they stand to gain??

Lets not overlook the obvious fact that the Mayor lost these issues after due process, ie; either through the alternative approval process, or a vote by a majority of Councilors. It was the Councilors that killed these projects, not special interest groups.

You might be able to make a **bona vide** case that these issues ie; Dyke, Pine Valley, Haldi Road, Downtown Parking, were initiated by special interest groups, then you would be on to something.

Your assertions as they now stand don’t hold any water. Give us some specifics.

Johnny Belt is a special interest group ….

A community is a compilation of special interest groups …… and it is difficult to come to a consensus, which is the modern way of doing things ….. we are no longer living in feudal times, although some major corporations still operate in that fashion.

“but voted in all but one incumbent councilor. Has anything really changed?”

New Councillors …… Everett, Koehler, Hall.

three of 8 councilors are new.

to those who would not know better, the statement above sound like there is was only one new councillor. Far from it.

I know many people were expecting much more from the new faces than we have been getting so far. Maybe it is finally sinking on them almost 2 years later that they are being led by the nose.

We need open meetings of City Council Committees. That means:

1. advertising the schedule of such meetings on the city web site.

2. live streaming of committee meetings on the city web site

3. timely publishing of approved city committee meeting minutes

4. a city councillor on every city committee as a non-voting liaison person

5. a city administrator on every city committee who knows the key subject matter because they are responsible for carrying out the work which the committee deals with

6. the return of the city planning commission as allowed for under the local government act.

7 a committed effort to make the committees of Council operate as they should.

Gus: I know many people were expecting much more from the new faces than we have been getting so far. Maybe it is finally sinking on them almost 2 years later that they are being led by the nose”

Bingo.

That, and they all want their jobs back….extra income, good business & political contacts and the opportunity to travel, be a mover and shaker…oh, and do the right thing by acting as altruistic stewards for our community, of course:)

Ah, I shouldn’t be such a jerk…I am certain that maybe three actually live up to the latter, and their time is appreciated.

I want to hear from the City Manager. Has Green muzzled her. Or is she afraid to talk as Bates was?

The City Manager has never run a City before. A bit different than managing a department within the provincial government.

Is her inexperience in modern City Administration starting to show? Perhaps she agrees with lack of transparency in municipal government.

Why can’t people read? Nowhere does it say that the pay parking is not going to return to the downtown. Geez All this means is that council is not going to grant the contract to any vendors at this time, it doesn’t say that pay parking is dead.

People like to read more into what is printed than what is not. The city won’t be buying any fancy pants license plate recognition system or fancy pay parking kiosks, at least not for a while. The whole thing needs a good rethink, more time on being financially prudent instead of tossing our tax dollars around like it’s a charitable plan.

Professional. Normally you would be right, however things are changing.

If the Mayor, some Councilors, and the City administration want to try again, I strongly suggest that they wait until after the next election. I can guarantee you that they do not have the gonads to run in the next election on a platform of bringing back pay parking, selling Pine Valley, building a dyke, or changing the OCP at will, or building a performing arts centre, or reducing costs by 10%

Perhaps those who tried and failed will not want to try again. If so, then downtown parking is in fact dead.

Palopu: “JohnnyBelt. Can you be so kind as to tell us who, and what these special interest groups are that you are always referring to, and what they stand to gain?”

You have got to be kidding. Have you not been following the news? Friends of Pine Valley/Haldi Road/the DBIA are all special interest groups, mostly concerned with maintaining the status quo, regardless of what it costs the taxpayer. Any time a change is proposed, there is some group created to fight it. This seems to be the way in PG and elsewhere.

Because of this, the Mayor and many of the councillors are afraid to make any difficult decisions, which might not be ‘popular’. Maybe they’re afraid of not getting re-elected. Who knows. It seems that even though they’ve flip flopped on many issues, they’re still going to have a hard time.

Professional wrote:

“Why can’t people read? Nowhere does it say that the pay parking is not going to return to the downtown.”

Why cant some people read more than one report on the same site and assimilate them? Even worse, why can’t they assimilate reports from multiple sites? Or, why can’t they go to the web site and listen to the actual words?

back to the quoted comment: “Geez All this means is that council is not going to grant the contract to any vendors at this time, it doesn’t say that pay parking is dead.”

That is an opinion. Of course pay parking is not dead. Neither is the river road dike dead. Nothing is dead. All issues in front of any government or any decision making group in a private business can be returned at another time when the conditions change.

Sometimes that can be 2 months, sometimes 2 years, sometimes 2 decades ……
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From one of several reports on this site about the issue of pay parking:

“City staff are expected to come back to Council with a new bylaw before the end of the year that will allow the City to have repeat offender vehicles towed.”

That is it for now. Plain and simple. Build an issue based cost recovery cost into that, and be done with it.

So someone wanting to protect greenspace/parkland from development is a special interest. Interesting.

What if a developer approached the city with a very lucrative offer to buy a 100′ strip of land in Ft. George park overlooking the river for luxury homes or purchase Connaught Hill to build a gated condo community and the residents resisted….would that too be special interest or merely maintaining quality of life?

HaldiHollindia residents were trying to protect their neighbourhoods from development that flew in the face of the OCP and that is special interest. Again interesting. You don’t think WoodsFehr have a special interest in making their wallets a bit thicker? Wonder how much they contributed to help offset the city’s legal bills to stuff this down the residents throats?

As for downtown, it is clear that the city is out of ideas on what to do, might as well hand off as much as they can to the DBIA. Best hope is they take a page from the Gateway and at least get something started.

Why not call a referendums on key issues ? and I’m not talking about the alternate approval process. If council truly wants to hear from Citizens then why not add the question of paid parking DT, the PAC, length of term of office, etc on the 2014 ballot and while it is an important issue it is clearly not the only pressing and long standing issue facing local government in PG. The question of fluoride in City water is already being added to the ballot… Why not add a couple more key items..this serves as a two pronged approach. It is a democratic process and allows local government to make the best use of available resources I.e., the municipal election ballot, a tool available for use by local governments yet it is rarely used.

If I ran the city I’d do away with 80% of the administrators and managers. Have all direction and accountability come down from empowered committees.

For me an example would be a parks, roads, water and sewer ect ect committee… each committee would have nine members… three voted from the unionized workers to represent the ideas for innovation from the workers… three appointed by council with at least one being a councilor and ideally three councilors holding these three positions…. and the final three being concerned volunteer stakeholders from the community appointed by vote in council.

9 members all with key perspectives that would help to ensure the best possible policy direction and budget accountability. Council would obviously have oversight, but the governance of the city would be open and transparent, and tax dollars would go towards actual work rather than administration.

I also think we should have term limits on top administrators. They should be shuffled through every 6-8 years and ideally we would have good long term councilors providing the direction for the city.

Good points DNHey. I agree we should have far more issues decided by referendum at election time. More democracy is good for accountability.

“Why not call a referendums on key issues”

Sort of like calling a referendum on how to design a hospital?

People do not understand that a city is a complex assembly of multiple functions which have to work together to provide the optimum support for the various groups which reside in the city.

As cities grow, stagnate and even shrink, and as the urban fabric in the province, country and world changes, the expectation of most people is that the place they live in will change with the social environment.

Then again, it is obvious that neither administration nor Council can get it right. So, let’s try the referendum for a while.

So, here is the first referendum question I would like to see.

“Should the City restrict the development of new residential subdivisions while promoting the densification of existing residential developments?”

If we did that, we would save considerably more money than almost any other infrastructure development.

The problem is, few people understand that, even though the OCP has spelled it out clearly for decades.

So, we need to first have a referendum on which questions should be put to referendum.

Next, we need to understand the new technology which has been available for our use for at least 2 decades which can poll people’s opinions for a fraction of the cost of the archaic methods we still use in this community.

From design by a committee of representatives, to design by population ….. an interesting concept which has not proven to make much difference.

“More democracy is good for accountability.”

Huh????

So the people who voted for a particular government are accountable for that? Who are they? Voting is an anonymous process in our system. Just as much of blogs are anonymous opinions. So who is accountable for anti ethnic posts, posts supporting the actions of Council, posts opposing the actions of the provincial government.

An anonymous group cannot be held accountable for anything.