Kaitlin MacLeod-Rogers
Opinion Reporter
Is the City of Calgary spending your tax dollars wisely? Ricky Leong of The Calgary Sun doesn’t think so. In a column for the Sun dated November 17th, Leong writes that municipal government is riddled with projects he calls are the “epitome of waste.” An example of this careless spending, he points out, is the video campaign on the city’s website to “convince us we should accept tax increases without a fight.” More importantly, he points to the numbers, themselves, as being misleading and untruthful. The city has saved taxpayers a 0.2% property tax increase (down to 4.8% from the proposed 5%) by reducing services like transit, a total savings of “dozens of millions of dollars.” Yet the projected operating budget for 2010 is slated to rise by $123 million over 2009. Leong says celebrating a reduction in taxes for citizens is “bend[ing] the truth.” He then asks city administrators to answer the following questions:
Would it be cheaper for the city to outsource such services as garbage collection, snow clearing and parks maintenance?
· Is there a better way to schedule workers and equipment to increase efficiency at Calgary Transit?
· Can laws be changed so municipal cemeteries can be privatized?
· Do we need hundreds upon hundreds of new police and bylaw officers?
Once practical answers are given to these difficult questions, he says, “only then can they truly claim they’ve tried to spend your money wisely.”
http://www.calgarysun.com/news/columnists/ricky_leong/2009/11/17/11772396-sun.html
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