City money matters

Re: Can’t cut your way to being a better city (Think Tank, Oct. 9)

I agree entirely with this assessment of the services provided in this city. Winnipeg works off slim budgets and it is readily apparent that it tends to do things on the cheap, but maybe it is forced to.

On the infrastructure front, multiple street-repair projects are worked on concurrently and seem to be interminable — because of multiple-project bidding protocols used to save money. And one repair seems to be enough funding to repair potholes each year in any reasonable timeframe — or over — in some older areas of the city, where driving on streets and back lanes can be like travelling through a war zone.

Services of all kinds are curtailed for the same reason. Money has always been tight and with the city’s population burgeoning immensely over the past decade, Winnipeg has faced mounting pressure to meet service requirements of all kinds. Emerging social problems (e.g., drugs, homelessness, violence) have added to the problem, making it increasingly difficult for the city to make ends meet.

It’s almost laughable that we have mayoral and councillor candidates promising a variety of service solutions when, as pointed out in Ms. McCracken’s article, Winnipeg’s low mill-rate increases put it far behind other major centres in funding per capita.

A fact that escapes notice in this whole discussion is that from 1998 to 2011 (14 years) successive mayors offered zero mill-rate increases (to taxpayers). The voting masses enthusiastically embraced this short-sighted, self-serving tactic, leaving future administrations with a depressed tax base to work with. If latter administrations ever tried to regain reasonable ground with ensuing rate increases, they would have been run out of town on a rail.

So here we are. Many people in this city continue to clamour for tax restraint and scream loudly at the notion of an impactful mill-rate increase. It would not surprise me that the same people jump forward and decry the service the city is providing for needs that they hold important.

And the beat goes on...

JACK GOODMAN Winnipeg