THE CASUAL GUYS LETTER TO CANDIDATE 3
Dear Candidate J,
I’m a 10-year resident in Municipality’s Neighborhood area. I didn’t have much time to plan my family’s move to City and the market at the time was of a nature that didn’t permit me to explore many options, so I didn't do much comparison of Neighborhood to other City neighborhoods. I’d like to express to you my observations gleaned over the last 10 years as they relate to the priorities as listed on your website.
Fiscal Responsibility
I agree with you that fiscal responsibility is paramount. Like many communities, City finds itself in a ponzi scheme of sorts, financing older neighborhoods with taxes from new development. It isn’t sustainable. Instead, I’m in favour of a vacancy tax. It should be implemented on all vacant properties and undeveloped land (other than land designated for agricultural purposes). City should tax speculators and developers more and reduce the tax burden on the middle class, small property owners. Properly planned, a vacancy tax could easily make City fiscally responsible.
Reliable Transit
As a user of Public Transportation Company’s services, I appreciate your focus in this area and I support your platform. It currently takes me about 1¼ hours (one-way) to get to my place of employment using public transportation. In rush hour, my drive would be 45 minutes. If not for the fact that I enjoy the reading time, I would abandon public transportation in favour of driving myself through my commute.
I respectfully suggest that the solution, however, is more than simply transit reliability. A key component to meaningful community development is walkability. Today, a resident of Neighborhood, an urban community, who doesn’t want to drive, must walk about 30 minutes to buy a loaf of bread, carton of milk, or fresh produce. Some residents must walk 20 minutes to get to the nearest bus route. While it’s great to be able to walk to the Local complex for recreation, the only commercial centre was added this year on Arterial Road near Crossroad Dr., still a 30-minute walk for most residents in the subdivision. And the meagre size of that commercial centre is far too small to accommodate Municipality south of the Small River.
Improvement to the transit service is part of the solution, but there is certainly much more to commuting than that.
Community Safety
Your solution to improved community safety seems to hinge on policing. While policing is an important part of public safety and security, it’s often overstated. I strongly suspect that services ancillary to policing are grossly underfunded. Mental health issues abound. Drug addiction is far too common. Both of these factors, among several others, give rise to crime. Funding needs to be allocated to build and enhance proven successful programs that can operate in tandem with a qualified police force, and not rely so heavily on police intervention.
Youth Engagement
Of all the Municipality candidates, yours is the only platform that speaks to youth engagement. The greatest challenge I’ve had with my own children’s participation in youth activities is the level of effort to get them to their activities. When I was a youth, I would manage to get myself to my activities of interest, often by cycling. By modern standards, Municipality’s cycling infrastructure is so poor that youth rely on parents to drive them throughout the region to participate in events. For me and my family, ease of access to activity locations would have been most helpful.
In conclusion, I applaud your sense of civic responsibility. I hope that the perspectives I’ve shared in this email letter resonate with you to some degree and that you’ll consider them in both your platform and, should you win the upcoming election, in your service to our community.
Kind regards,
The Casual Guy
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