Despite repeated home flooding attributed to climate change, the maintenance of the city’s stormwater infrastructure is being shortchanged again as council tries to keep taxes as low as possible in an election year.
The city’s senior management team has overruled its economic development director and ordered higher industrial development charges (DC) to reduce taxpayer-funded subsidies.
What role did backroom lobbying play in unnecessary city purchases of airport lands or in the subsequent urban boundary expansion for the aerotropolis or in the OMB Elfrida appeal which promises to provide windfall profits to speculators?
1. Airport finances remain secret 2. Line 9 lawsuit 3. Environmental Summit 4. Response to fracking resolution
Local taxpayers have spent over $10 million buying land at inflated prices for an airport runway extension that may never be built.
More financial incentives for growth are being advocated by city staff who believe that already steeply-discounted development fees are not enough to boost Hamilton’s competitiveness, and who contend additional concessions should be made to attract large corporations.
The city will spend $1 million on studies for a future urban boundary expansion that’s opposed by the province and is currently before the Ontario Municipal Board.
This is a regular CATCH summary of votes at committee and council meetings. This report covers the month of February 2014.
A very modest plan to increase transparency of backroom influences on councillors has ended in naught after seven years of dithering and delay.
The majority of city council has again over-ruled its staff and enlarged the aerotropolis, and this time is also thumbing its nose at the Ontario Municipal Board.
More than four years after it was discovered, the world-record levels of a toxic flame-retardant chemical that have contaminated the Binbrook Conservation Area reservoir and the Welland River still await a cleanup plan being bandied back and forth between the provincial Ministry of the Environment and Tradeport International.
It appears the city has little appetite to relieve taxpayers of millions each year in subsidies for sprawl development.
The National Energy Board has announced it will release its decision tomorrow on Enbridge’s controversial plan to increase flows in Line 9 between Sarnia and Montreal and to also ship bitumen from the Alberta tar sands through the 39-year old pipeline.
A decision has been put off again on the first city-funded improvements in residential HSR service in over twenty years that would add service to the fastest-growing parts of Hamilton.
This is a regular CATCH summary of votes at committee and council meetings. This report covers the month of January 2014.
At the request of the Hamilton chapter of the Council of Canadians, city council is calling on the provincial and federal governments to impose a moratorium on hydraulic fracking – the unconventional method of extracting oil and gas that uses high pressure mixtures of chemicals, sand and large volumes of water to blast apart underground rock formations.
Council’s decision to continue an expensive lawsuit against the Canadian government is partly based on the belief that Red Hill Parkway costs were greatly increased because of the delay from federal environmental assessment.
Enbridge’s plan to replace part of a Hamilton pipeline is facing strong opposition from First Nations as well as unspecified “concerns” from the city.
Provincial rules mean at least a quarter of growth costs are paid by existing taxpayers, says the city, so reforms to development charges (DC) legislation under consideration could help reduce Hamilton’s $2 billion shortfall in infrastructure maintenance.