ward3brighton.ca

I received an email today from a friend and resident of Ward 3 inquiring about public rights-of-way in his area. The neighbourhood chatter is that these rights-of-way are slowly being made completely inaccessible and thus diminishing the walkability of the neighbourhood.

The newer areas of Brighton, like many areas of the city, don’t appear to have been designed with pedestrian conerns in mind. There are many instances of two places that are very close together “as the crow flies”, but require you to walk a long circuitous path along streets and sidewalks to get from one to the other.

There are a few good examples of public footpaths that make the life of pedestrians easier in Ward 3 (particularly if you’re a student west of North River Rd). There are, however, a couple of examples — off the top of my head, and in my immediate vicinity — of rights-of-way being lost to new developments that have plunked themselves, literally, right in the walking publics’ path.

I’m in the process of making some inquiries to the city’s planning department and to our solicitor to try to find out how the city can defend these rights-of-way. What would it take to target some of these and put them into active use to make our neighbourhoods more walkable and family-friendly?

This recent article in the Guardian was not perfectly clear on a couple of points. First, council did not ‘OK’ the retail development in Winsloe because we had no power to okay it, or deny it. The development is taking place on a stretch of road that remains the jurisdiction of the provincial government. The developer acquired all the necessary approvals from the the provincial government and the project can go ahead regardless of city council’s opinion. The developer did volunteer to enter into a Development Agreement with the city’s Planning Department, which gives the city some assurance that the development will conform to certain standards, but that agreement has not, or had not, been signed.

Secondly, the city’s Planning Board recommended against an application to rezone a property on St. Peter’s Rd. for the purpose of a possible grocery store, among other things, because there are already two large parcels of land in the immediate vicinity that allow for commercial development such as supermarkets, shopping centres, grocery stores, retail stores, etc. Councillor Devine’s point, which was not entirely clear in the comments attributed to her, is that we need to strengthen the existing undeveloped commercial nodes in East Royalty, rather than creating more commercial space by rezoning existing residential property. The issue is not whether the residents of East Royalty should or should not have a supermarket or other commercial developments in their neighbourhood. It was the opinion of Planning Board that the property in question need not be rezoned for such development to take place in East Royalty.

Incidentally, this story sparked a conversation with a small grocery store operator in my ward yesterday. He expressed surprise that anyone would want into the increasingly competitive and difficult grocery market in Charlottetown. For small operators such as him, Sunday shopping has simply made an already crowded market even more difficult to compete in.

All municipal, all the time; that’s the slogan of MUNIBlogs, an aggregator of blogging municipal politicians from across Canada. They also have a “Related Blogs” section that features blogs of municipal “critics, pundits, allies and activists”. Seems like a good idea to me.

The site has only been up and running for a few weeks, and so far a councillor from Fredericton and I are holding up the fort east of Ontario. I’m sure that will change over time, as the site undergoes some fine tuning and new bloggers are discovered.

Of the few visitors I get to this website, many are looking for information about bottled water bans in general, or specifically the ban put in place by the city of Charlottetown. I know this because my statistics application identifies the search engine string a visitor used that led them here, among other interesting data about visitors. For example, I noticed that someone using a computer on the Radio-Canada network had visited last night and this morning after having searched for “city hall charlottetown bottled water“.

I assumed a reporter was doing some research for a story. By mid-morning I received a call from Sophia Harris who was putting together a story for Compass (our local CBC evening news show), which was also to be part of a larger story being produced for The National (our national CBC nightly news show). I agreed to meet Sophia at City Hall around noon where I had a priorly scheduled meeting. We shot some staged footage of me and HR Director Andrew Thompson filling our paper cups with Charlottetown’s finest municipal H2O, and I answered some questions to the best of my ability.

This was the second time this summer a reporter had tracked me down via this website to discuss our bottled water ban. Several weeks ago, I received a call from Kim Arnott, a freelance writer for the Municipal Information Network, who wrote a story about the current trend away from bottled water.

Given the almost daily visitors here who are curious about the issue, I expect we’ll hear more and more stories in the media and very likely many municipalities following Charlottetown’s lead. For me this ban makes perfect sense from four different perspectives:

1. Purchasing bottled water reflects badly on us, as the purveyor of clean water services in Charlottetown. We should enthusiastically endorse our own product because it is excellent;
2. Bottled water is expensive;
3. Bottled water is not an environmentally benign product. The particular brand that the city used to purchase was shipped from western Canada, which leaves a huge carbon footprint, not to mention the waste in landfills;
4. We should discourage the effects of market forces on something every human needs. It shouldn’t become the new oil.

The Report of the City of Charlottetown Cosmetic Pesticide ad-hoc Committee [link to .PDF] is now officially public. Council voted unanimously to release the report at last night’s regular monthly meeting of council. As I’ve explained in countless emails and random conversations over the last three weeks — and as reiterated by several councillors last night — there was never any intention to do otherwise. You can download the document in its unredacted entirety using the link above.

There will be a resolution before council at our regular monthly meeting on Monday, August 13th, to officially make the cosmetic pesticide report public.

The City of Charlottetown would require an amendment to the Highway Traffic Act to allow us to double fines for school zone speeders. At a meeting of council on Monday night, it was decided to send a renewed request to the new provincial government for enabling legislation for the use of photo radar (the City has made no decision on the use of photo radar, but we would like the ability to use it if we wish to).

An argument was made that we should not ask for both photo radar legislation, and an increase in fines in school zones, as we were unlikely to be granted both, an argument I did not understand. My position was that the province should be willing to give munipalities every tool we require to deal with a problem that many see as a growing safety concern. In the end, it was decided to send an official request for both; photo radar legislation, and an amendment to allow for the doubling of fines in school zones (and construction zones). This request will be sent by City administration, but I have taken the time to write personally to my MLA (Premier Ghiz) about the issue. If you feel that one or both of these requests are important, please contact your MLA as well.

The following items are part of my proposal that was sent for consideration by the Police Committee, and the Public Works Committee. Each member of council was also sent a copy. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please get in touch or leave a comment on this post.

1. That the city of Charlottetown define the specific geographic boundaries of the school zone surrounding each school in the city. The perimeter of the school zones should be clearly defined, and wide enough to provide for the safety of the many children who walk to our schools on city streets, sidewalks, and crosswalks. In Ward 3 — and possibly in other wards — there is a sufficient number of schools within such a small area, that it may be possible, even desirable, to create a zone that encompasses more than one school.
2. That we enshrine the guidelines for defining school zones, and the definitions of the new school zone boundaries in a policy document or bylaw, whichever is appropriate or necessary.
3. That we establish guidelines for clearly marking the entry/exit points for vehicle traffic, using signage, lights, street painting, etc. All vehicles should be made aware, as clearly as possible, when they have crossed the boundary into, or out of, a school zone.
4. That we make the necessary bylaw changes to increase the fines for speeding violations within the newly defined school zones. The increase of fines would need to be clearly posted, with an accompanying public awareness campaign. This could be limited to periods between 8 – 4, Monday to Friday, or whatever is deemed appropriate.

I’ve been on vacation so I haven’t paid much attention to news of any kind. I only became aware of the brouhaha over the non-release of the report from the ad-hoc committee studying the issue of cosmetic pesticides when my inbox began filling up quickly with angry emails. Apparently, some of the news reports were using none-too-suptle words like “secret” and “bury” to describe what council intended to do with the report. This is not true. What occurred when the report was presented last week to the Committee of the Whole Council (i.e. everyone on council and the Mayor) was a disagreement on process. It was felt by many on council that the correct process would have been for the ad-hoc committee to present their findings to the standing committee responsible for the issue — the Water, Sewer and Environment Committee chaired by Councillor David MacDonald.

Personally, I decided it was appropriate to allow the report to be reviewed and discussed by the Environment Committee before releasing the document publicly. But I was very clear with the rest of council that I believed the report should be released immediately upon review by the Environment Committee. I did not sense any consensus amongst councillors that the report should be kept confidential, as was apparently reported.
I have heard that media reports later in the day yesterday did a better job of explaining the process that council intends to follow. This would also explain why the river of emails I was receiving from concerned residents of the city trickled off this morning. In any case, someone has already released the report and the main recommendations are now publicly known. Council will now start the process of making a decision on those recommendations.