Aging / Failing Infrastructure

[haljackey]

London's under mandatory water restrictions after a pipeline busted for the second time in two years.

When we will we figure out that our old, aging infrastructure needs to be repaired, modernized, upgraded and expanded? And this doesn't just apply to utilities...

Unless we're willing to foot the bill to do something about it, chronic infrastructure failures will become more common and will devastate the economy and quality of life.

[go_leafs_go02]

Utilities are never seemingly a big deal in terms of infrastructure, because people just assume it naturally works, and the vast majority of it is out of sight/mind.

Transportation items, new infrastructure, transit, etc, is always a big deal because people know for a fact, it doesn't always work in terms of efficiency.

[haljackey]

A new report finds that London needs significant investments to fix, update and expand our infrastructure.

It also mentions ballooning police budgets. I am not too knowledgeable about this, but it seems to me our city doesn't have a crime problem. The status-quo should be fine and would help maintain out tax freeze.

Anyway, link to article: http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2.../19814536.html

I think that infrastructure investments are the #1 thing London can do to improve the city for both residents and businesses.

[Pimpmasterdac]

The major increase in policing costs are officers salaries. No one really has the gall or strength to put a freeze on their salaries, as this action would be twisted into not paying police = not funding crime prevention = soft on crime, which no politician wants to be labeled. Plus as they're an essential service that cannot strike, they have different procedures for labour disputes that go to arbitration, which gives them modest-good yearly increases.

Public servants getting year over year wage increases isn't just a municipal problem, huge provincially where McGuinty is getting hammered by unions for his proposed freeze and Harper is crucified for cutting ~19k federal jobs. Ultimately this is for the best, just need this type of leadership and strength on all government levels.

As far as infrastructure under-funding, I somewhat disagree with that article, primarily the political side. Fontana fundamentally blames the senior levels of government for not giving London enough money. While there has been lots of downloading to lower levels of government which do need to be adjusted, Fontana's primarily responsible for that (a Chretien Liberal). Now the shoe's on the other foot he's crying the blues about the poor municipalities.

Ultimately he's going to be in a tough position for next years budget, which there are plenty of solutions for, raise taxes, user fees, spending cuts to (special interest) programs. Social programs have a human face that can be put in front of the camera to bemoan cuts, where infrastructure is faceless, so its the one that unfortunately gets deferred year over year. They just wants to avoid having to make difficult decisions, and would rather blame other levels of government than decisively deal with the problem!

[MolsonExport]

Yeah, Fontana is responsible for the lousy infrastructure here in London (as a Chretien liberal). What a load of horsepoopy.

[Pimpmasterdac]

Fontana sure was! Liberals 1995 Federal budget that gutted transfers to the provinces, which started the whole downloading to municipalities.