I am pleased to release my Plan for Prosperity – a comprehensive platform of ideas and solutions designed to accelerate our economic development results.
If I’m elected mayor, I won’t need four years to figure out a direction. I am ready to hit the ground running now.
It is posted as a text web page or you can download the entire book as a PDF file.
The entire document is 33 pages long. I don’t expect everyone to read it through. All I ask is that you consider giving your vote to a candidate who cared enough about the community to run for mayor in difficult times and present a book of answers.
Put your trust in me with your vote, and I will work hard as a team leader to refine and implement these ideas and help us achieve good things.
I’m ready!
I did not have time to read in depth but most of what you’re saying is stuff I have been saying since I moved to Chatham. Obviously, being a small business owner you have more insight into how hard it is for business owners to operate in CK. That is an area I know little of but I do realize we need to start protecting what we have. We need incentives and lower taxes to keep our business, “OUR” businesses.
However I didn’t see anything about residential taxes. Perhaps I missed it but our residential taxes are much too high. My parents live in Windsor, in a upper scale neighbourhood and pay about $70/month less in property taxes than we do, in a middle class neighbourhood. Again, if I missed it I apologize but do you have any plan to get residential property taxes back in line with where they should be?
Comment by B. Masse — October 17, 2010 @ 1:25 PM
Yes, I do have plans to address residential taxes. The Plan for Prosperity is more focused on business aspects.
Some of the things I’ve mentioned on the campaign trail are controlling Sunshine Club salaries, which received a 7.3% increase last year and now total $8.5 million. Our IT budget could accumulate millions in savings if we migrated to free Open Source software instead of locking in to single-vendor applications. The city of Vancouver is already doing this, and free software is said to have saved $60 billion in total to date industry-wide. This software is then owned by the people and I don’t understand why governments are not working together to use and develop this resource.
Then we have the millions spent on master plans and consultant reports that should be produced by qualified members of our community instead. No elected official has ever looked at the base budget for savings. I’m also in favour of an appointed Auditor General who can go places council cannot to ensure public money is being spent wisely.
There have been all these grandiose projects with huge costs, such as the 401 Industrial Park and all the municipal resources spent on the defunct Rec Centre plans. Before we can even consider this kind of thing in the future, we need to have stability in the community. Hence, promote what we already have instead of inventing excuses. If these ideas are so good then the private sector will step in.
Therefore, my approach is to get these expenses under control while aggressively pursuing new business and residential attraction so that our tax base expands and tax rates go down. I’m good at troubleshooting and thinking up ways to achieve similar results for less money because I had to do this as a business owner and manager. I hear the anger out there over taxes and I get it.
Comment by Austin Wright — October 17, 2010 @ 1:51 PM