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88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

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Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#31

Post by michaelcampbell »

techiferous wrote: post #2

What does being 88 years old have to do with anything? The title could've been "White Mayor Gets City Debt-free..." or "Female Mayor Gets City Debt-free..." One thing that annoys me is that for anyone over 80 years old, the first (and often only) thing that people notice is their age. When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

> When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

Good luck.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#32

Post by RyanMcGreal »

A few problems with this rosy analysis:

1. Mississauga's vast, low-density road system, built in a non-stop sprawlathon over the past 40 years, is aging and will soon require heavy-duty maintenance costs. Without development charges to pay for this (the city is now built out), the current municipal funding model has a pretty abrupt time limit.

2. Mississauga would not enjoy as high a ratio of commercial to residential property tax revenues as it does were it not nestled right next to Pearson International Airport. So much for the unregulated free market. Given that airport-related development is peaking with global oil production rates, this economic gravy train is about to run dry.

3. Mississauga achieves its positive municipal cash flow by aggressively scrimping on public amenities and infrastructure. Toronto and Hamilton bear most of the regional burden of poverty (and their struggling municipal finances reflect this imbalance), but the lack of public transit in Mississauga will start to put the squeeze on tha 'city' as oil prices become more volatile over the next several years.

In all, Mississauga is heading toward a perfect storm of rising infrastructure costs, falling industrial revenues, and curtailed driving as a replacement for a real urban transportation system.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#33

Post by ctingom »

teeja wrote: post #28
potatolicious wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, being part of the lower class in Mississauga is probably one of the worst places in Canada to do so - public transit is practically non-existent, the city is a gigantic, congested network of ultra-wide boulevards. It is impossible to survive there without a car, thus further depressing the income of working class people. Mississauga is a textbook example, IMHO, of a city gone wrong . It is the best Cana…

Putting a full set of electric buses on those streets would still leave a big chunk of that $700mil in the bank.

Mississauga Transit has a current active bus fleet of around 410 buses. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga_Transit#Bus_fleet

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#34

Post by a-priori »

JimmyL wrote: post #30
teeja wrote: post #27

Wow. That is one cool mayor. And debt-free, just like North Dakota!

Also interesting: she doesn't campaign for re-election any more. She files the paperwork to be a candidate, and that's it. She refuses to accept any donations (saying instead people should donate to charity), does effectively no campaign events, and gets re-elected with 90%+ each time.

"One of her friends is Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry, who joked during her 87th birthday that while 98 per cent of the city voted for her, he was looking for the remaining 2 per cent that didn't."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_McCallion

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#35

Post by astrodust »

patrickgzill wrote: post #21
celticjames wrote: post #19

Have you been to Mississauga? It's urban sprawl gone mad. It's one of the most bland, characterless strip mall excuses for a city in North America. The books may be balanced, but it's a joyless wasteland of big box stores and cookie cutter urban development.

If you look at a map at the "proper" scale, you will realize that it is really just a repeated set of streets, truly cookie cutter as you say. Look at the curved roads which go between major streets - they all curve roughly the same way, and feed into the residential areas on the same pattern.

The first thing they do in any suburban construction in Mississauga is scrape the terrain flat, then add in artful hills and curves as dictated by the blueprints, not as nature had them. The end result is this homogeneous, entirely manufactured landscape.

The roads in Mississauga were designed to handle traffic twenty years in the future. Unfortunately they were built in the 1970s and are now feeling the strain.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#36

Post by hnal943 »

9oliYQjP wrote: post #18

Woah woah woah. I live in Toronto. Mississauga is a suburb. They got out of debt by getting into bed with developers who went wild with unrestricted development. All this wouldn't be out of the norm if the mayor's son wasn't a developer and she had excused herself from meetings involving the city and his company. But she failed to disclose the conflict of interest and her son's company benefited. Mississauga is now a…

How does a development boom burden tax payers? Were there no business created in the "unrestricted development?" It stands to reason that a healthy business climate generates tax revenue, instead of increasing the taxes of existing tax payers.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#37

Post by rfghjhbg »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #32

A few problems with this rosy analysis: 1. Mississauga's vast, low-density road system, built in a non-stop sprawlathon over the past 40 years, is aging and will soon require heavy-duty maintenance costs. Without development charges to pay for this (the city is now built out), the current municipal funding model has a pretty abrupt time limit. 2. Mississauga would not enjoy as high a ratio of commercial to residentia…

And is based on having the HQs of global corps there. As soon as another city offers a better tax break those HQs will move in a nano-second.

Look at Ireland when the bank crash hit the US

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#38

Post by gaius »

ghshephard wrote: post #14
techiferous wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd also mention that she does not in any way seem offended by such comments." Yeah, I wonder how I'll feel about this when I'm older. Maybe I won't mind. It just sounds weird to me when people mention the age of someone and it's not relevant to the story, kind of like when someone is telling you a story about someone and they mention that they are black and it's completely irrelevant.

I recall, at the ripe old age of 34, being put off by a new engineer who said "People of your generation look at technology different than us younger people, but it's cool that you are so familiar with the internet." Now, I recognize that 34 is _little_ out of place at some startups, but I hadn't realized I'd moved into a new generation. It didn't really bother me, so much as cause me to be aware that time is certain…

LOL! These kids are great at friending each other on MySpace and watching videos on Youtube, but people our age built the Internet one metre of fibre at a time. We're the creators, they're just consumers.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#39

Post by sburgess »

Estragon wrote: post #29
9oliYQjP wrote: post #18

Woah woah woah. I live in Toronto. Mississauga is a suburb. They got out of debt by getting into bed with developers who went wild with unrestricted development. All this wouldn't be out of the norm if the mayor's son wasn't a developer and she had excused herself from meetings involving the city and his company. But she failed to disclose the conflict of interest and her son's company benefited. Mississauga is now a…

Thanks for explaining this. I knew there had to be more to it than the author's free-market ideology.

I am a fan of design first. If it is a community failure, than so be it. However, there is certainly something to be said for not passing on debt to your kids. As both an aspiring planner and a father, I appreciate communities that seek to be as neutral as possible with their finances. Peace.

Re: 88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

#40

Post by rfghjhbg »

hnal943 wrote: post #36
9oliYQjP wrote: post #18

Woah woah woah. I live in Toronto. Mississauga is a suburb. They got out of debt by getting into bed with developers who went wild with unrestricted development. All this wouldn't be out of the norm if the mayor's son wasn't a developer and she had excused herself from meetings involving the city and his company. But she failed to disclose the conflict of interest and her son's company benefited. Mississauga is now a…

How does a development boom burden tax payers? Were there no business created in the "unrestricted development?" It stands to reason that a healthy business climate generates tax revenue, instead of increasing the taxes of existing tax payers.

No - they were mostly just housing suburbs. That brings in income from fees when the houses are built - but you have roads, sewer/water, schools, hospitals to fund forever.

That's fine as long as the people living in those houses are tax-profitable middle class dual income. As soon as they aren't you have just built a 500,000 person slum to fund.

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