from Paul Pagnuelo to Lindsay This Week, etc.
Is amalgamation working?
...add your comments here:
Following this year's budget fiasco, the City of Kawartha Lakes Council needs to go back to the drawing board. As a new Council in a new city, it is paramount that it review the relevance of all non-provincially mandated programmes and services being offered at the municipal level.
Council must rethink the City's social, economic, environmental and fiscal objectives. It should shed all discretionary and low priority ones that are no longer affordable or should not be within the municipality's purview. Moreover, it must undertake a review of each essential service to see if they can be redesigned or if alternate service delivery can improve quality and/or lower costs.
In light of the massive tax increases that will hit many homeowners and businesses next year, Council has an immediate pressing priority. It must revisit all new expenditure commitments it approved this summer that will dig even deeper into taxpayers' pockets in the years ahead.
A case in point is its recent decision to provide the Ross Memorial Hospital in Lindsay with $7 million for capital expansion. While Council's gesture might be heart-warming, it had no right to decide this issue.
To begin with, hospital funding is a joint provincial/federal responsibility, not a municipal one. For City Council to commit local taxpayers to pay for anything through our property taxes that is not a municipal service opens a Pandora's box. It sets a very dangerous precedent to fund future social services and other worthy charitable causes from an already strained property tax system. What's next? Will school boards be asking City Council to fund new schools on top of our provincial taxes and the provincially mandated education portion of our property taxes?
Council's decision also ignores an important fact. Many of the wards in our City fall within the catchment area of other hospitals. To expect those of us, who use hospitals in Port Perry, Bowmanville, Oshawa, Peterborough and Minden, to fund with our property taxes a hospital we don't use in Lindsay is patently unfair.
Citizens across the province historically have played a role in the fundraising efforts of their local hospitals through individual and corporate charitable donations. Moreover, when doing so, they are provided with a charitable tax receipt that they can offset towards their provincial and federal income tax. However, using the property tax base is quite a very different matter.
To compound matters, City Hall really had no mandate from voters to decide this issue. Neither the Mayor nor any of the Councilors raised the idea in last November's municipal elections. Moreover, Council sought no public consultation on the matter before it decided to overstep its authority.
The matter of funding the Ross Memorial or for that matter any hospital should be put to the residents of the City by way of a binding referendum, employing Ontario's Direct Democracy Through Municipal Referendums Act. City Hall should exempt those wards from sharing in the cost, where the majority of their taxpayers object to a specific levy or tax hike for hospital funding.
The philosophical issue of funding the capital needs of our hospitals through property taxes must receive a full public airing. The taxpayers of the City should be the ones to decide the issue by referendum, not the elite on City Council behind closed doors.
Sincerely,
Paul Pagnuelo
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