Bob Wilson wants residents at the budget cutting table during the first 100 days of a new municipal government.

100 daysWith a new municipal government getting ready to assume power the question is – what will they do first?

What are the big issues?

In an exclusive interview with Mayor Elect Marianne Meed Ward before the election she said that her goals were set out in her campaign platform which we pointed out was just a piece of paper.

Governing is far more fluid; one never knows what is going to crop up on any given day.

We asked the readers of the Gazette what they thought the new council should attempt to get done in its first hundred days.

Here are some of their thoughts.

By Bob Wilson
November 8th, 2018
BURLINGTON, ON

Every City Department must meet a minimum 5% budget reduction target for the fiscal year. This must be met by efficiencies, not cuts to services.

Parking - municipal cash grab

A bylaw being enforced.

For those Departments entrusted with enforcing bylaws, they must become revenue neutral in fiscal 2019. They must ensure they charge and collect bylaw infringement fees as revenue to cover their expenses 100%.

Failure to meet either of these targets means performance bonuses and pay increases for the year will be withheld for all Management positions.

All Departments must present their plans to meet these Objectives to a Fiscal Accountability & Civic Transparency (FACT) Committee made up of Council as well as 1 civic representative from each Ward.

The Ward civic reps will be nominated from new Ward Community Action Groups and report FACT Committee presentations to their respective Action Groups.

Feedback and comments on FACT matters will be fed back to Ward Councillors at the FACT Committee for consensus and agreement on Dept plans to reach their fiscal challenges.

Bob Wilson
Maple Community Resident

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7 comments to Bob Wilson wants residents at the budget cutting table during the first 100 days of a new municipal government.

  • Murray Charlton

    Here is a slightly different idea.
    Set up an award system for City staff who innovate efficiencies.
    Managers should be encouraged to listen to all levels of staff regarding how to do things better.
    Having said this I don’t have suggestions – I see great service and superb use of technology at the library, seniors centre and Tansley Woods. I do see some opportunities when I see workers out in the field but it’s easy to criticize not knowing details. Listen to our workers!

  • Tom Muir

    I worked for the Fed for 30 years, and the Province for 4, for many Parties in charge, and the way budget cuts were done there was amazingly simple.

    If the target was to restrict increases in budgets to inflation, and the estimates were coming in over that, like in Burlington for years, it was simply ordered that the program managers had to cut the extra, and they made the decisions about what got cut to make the target.

    Really simple. Just order the managers to deliver the cut and they get to choose what gets cut.

    Anybody not get that?

  • D Walker

    I guess my only question is whether or not the by-law enforcement is currently an issue? I haven’t really heard it mentioned before. In Aldershot, the by-law officers are making a pretty penny putting parking tickets on those people parking illegally close to the intersection of Cooke & Masonry. Personally, I think that this extra revenue is a reason why the City of Burlington isn’t overly concerned with expanding the GO Station parking at Aldershot (despite the fact that it has been needed for more than 2 years now, and the city & metrolinx have had plans since that time that continually get pushed back).

    Are other parts of the city not having proper by-law enforcement?

    To be honest, unless by-law officers are needed in a specific area, I don’t want them going around trying to meet a “quota” and being overly nit-picky without necessity. Requiring them to be revenue neutral suggests to me that they’d likely start enforcing a quota and being unnecessarily aggressive.

  • joe gaetan

    Private companies often have improvement goals, not to be mean, but to survive. But to some reducing the cost of running our city by setting targets is anathema. This being the case, why not look at it through the lens of continuous improvement, sometimes called continual improvement. Continuous improvement entails the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes through incremental and breakthrough improvements.

  • Susan L.

    The idea of a minimum 5% budget reduction assumes that no City Department is currently underfunded and all City Departments are funded properly.

    “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken

  • Jim Thomson

    Why didn’t Bob Wilson run on this in the election?

  • steven craig gardner

    this is just crazt sounds very trump or ford ish as as direction. Do we know there is 5% fat or is it being called gravy here like Ford does. Is Fiscal Accountability & Civic Transparency (FACT) Committee an existing body as i had not heard of thois before if not who decided this i have not seen any referendum during elections on this. We are still a democracy right?we are not a dictatorship Beginning to feel we are hearing from not the right people if we want to keep Burlington grat as it is.