Jennifer Smith

On Wednesday afternoon I attended an open house forum on affordable housing in Halton. The event included a presentation on a recently approved development near Allendale, on the site of the old Martin House. The three storey, 80 unit building will provide assisted rental housing for qualifying seniors and people with disabilities. From what I understand, federal funding has already been approved for half the units while provincial funding for the other half is expected soon, but the Region is going ahead with all 80 regardless.

I spent that afternoon in the company of Ward 4 Councillor Wendy Schau, who has fought for affordable housing here in Milton as chair of the Milton Affordable Housing Coalition and in many other ways during her entire seven year tenure on Council. It's a tough row to hoe, especially in a town that likes to think of itself as uniformly affluent, where poverty and homelessness are too often perceived as 'city' issues.

I recently had my own little taste of just how wrong that perception is.

After our Milton Choristers concert at Knox Presbyterian Church last weekend, the folks putting the risers away noticed a middle-aged gentlemen still sitting in one of the back pews. He told them he had nowhere else to go, and had been sleeping out in the cold for the past three nights.

Not knowing what else to do, and knowing that Knox wasn't set up for this sort of thing, the guys phoned the police to see if they could help. Unfortunately, the man left before the police arrived, but it seems there wasn't much they could have done anyway. Apparently the nearest men's shelter is in Oakville, and the police aren't allowed to drive folks down there.

St. Paul's United has made some recent efforts to set up shelter space, first in their basement and later with the Fifth Wheel, but zoning, bureaucracy, and general resistance keep getting in the way.

Of course, this type of very visible homelessness is still relatively rare in Milton. But talk to Wendy about the pervasive housing issues in this town and you will come to understand that people sleeping on the street is only one end of a very broad spectrum of housing problems that exist in the more hidden corners of our town.

Abused or displaced youth sleeping in the woods or on downtown roofs. Individuals and families, out of work or just underemployed, sleeping on friends' couches, often moving from house to house. Unregulated and poorly maintained rooming houses instead of proper transitional housing. Seniors on a fixed income either physically or financially unable to stay in their own home, often living with family members because they can't afford anything else.

It's that last category who will be benefiting most from this new development, which is great news for Milton seniors. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of other people in Milton who desperately need affordable housing - or even just some more reasonably priced rental apartments.

The only option for them right now is to move elsewhere, and that's just not acceptable for a caring community like Milton.



For more on what's happening on the homeless and affordable housing front in Milton, I highly recommend the "Homeless in Milton, Ontario" blog.

If ever there were a test of a candidate's resolve to serve on this Town's Council, last night was surely it.

What should have been the straightforward review and acceptance of a series of staff reports turned into a four hour marathon that whittled the initial crowd of 35 visitors down to a half dozen stragglers by the time we broke at nearly 11:30.

I'm pleased to report that most of the die-hards were my fellow election candidates.

The main topic of discussion was not, as I had expected, the status report on the disposition of the Bruce Street Library, but rather the 100-page Draft Intensification Report. If you haven't read the report yet, I strongly suggest that you do. At the very least, you should read the open house presentations and summaries.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

What surprised me was not the importance they placed on this report - which is, after all, going determine the shape and character of downtown Milton for the next several decades. What surprised me was that the issues raised had not been raised and resolved prior to last night's meeting. After all, the development of this plan has been ongoing for months now through public meetings and consultations and town committees. The final report itself was released nearly a month ago, and is now due to be presented to the Region and the Province as our blueprint for intensification.

Still, it was good to see that at least some of our councillors have put some thought into this and are determined to get it right. Jan Mowbray, Paul Scherer, and Colin Best had the most to say, and other councillors asked some perceptive questions and comments as well. The discussion mainly centred around the costs and difficulties of bringing additional water, sewage and other services into the urban centre, the benefits of pre-zoning and stringent urban design regulations, and what is being done to resolve the issue of development restrictions in the floodplain area.

Incredibly, Mike Boughton was almost completely silent. In fact, his sole contribution to the discussion was a brief comment agreeing with his fellow Ward 2 councillor that the hospital expansion is really, really important.

Make no mistake: while most of the intensification is going to take place in Ward 4, the process is going to have a profound effect on the entire town, and on Ward 2 in particular. If done right, it will bring thousands of new residents within walking distance of our section of Main Street, and will create a continuous pedestrian and transit-friendly shopping and residential district joining our currently isolated historic downtown to the GO station, the Supercentre retail development, and the new arts centre and library.

If done wrong, we could end up with yet another section of town devoted to strip malls, big box stores, giant parking lots, and expensive condo developments. They'll all just be a little taller.

Then there's the library.

By the time the discussion got around to this staff report on the potential fate of the Bruce Street Library, it was after 11:00 and everyone had pretty much run out of juice. There wasn't really much to talk about anyway since the major decisions have already been made, and Council was just receiving this report for information.

The report is very brief, and can be summed up in its closing paragraphs:

There has been significant interest expressed by current users of the library as to the future plans for that building when the library moves to its new location in 2011. The analysis currently underway as a result of this interest is still very preliminary in scope. Staff is planning to identify possible project options as part of the 2011 – 2021 Capital Budget forecast to be brought forward to Council in the Spring.

Any future project planning of a more detailed nature would include consultation with all stakeholders. This report is very preliminary, and is in response to public interest in the future of the library building at 45 Bruce Street. Should Council recommend alternate direction to staff, this will assist in any further analysis or research being undertaken prior to reporting back with options and / or recommendations.

What I have been told by our Head Librarian and others on the Library Board is that any potential plans for the Bruce Street facility will NOT include its use as a public library. Not even a branch.

I'll be talking more about the library situation in future posts, but in the meantime I would strongly encourage you to continue calling and sending emails to your local councillors to let them know what you think and to find out exactly where they stand on this issue.

I don't generally do breakfast. Nor do I do early mornings - certainly not since I started working nights. Nevertheless, on Thursday morning I got up about three hours earlier than my accustomed time and headed out to the annual Mayor's Breakfast, presented by the Milton Chamber of Commerce.

It was quite the turnout. You'd think it was an election year or something.

The presentations were surprisingly interesting. They started with OLG (Ontario Lottery & Gaming) on their new partnership with Bullfrog Power, during which they announced that their IT centre and six of their casinos and slots centres - including the one at Mohawk - will now be 100% powered by green electricity. Well, the equivalent anyway. When companies and individuals pay Bullfrog for their electricity, that amount of low-impact renewable energy is injected into the grid from wind turbines and other renewable sources.

It's an innovative approach, and even though it's only one small step, I'm glad that OLG is making this move.



The Town's CAO Mario Belvedere then did a presentation on "The Business of Town Hall", in which he distilled the otherwise complex finances of the town's various departments and broke them down into their simplest form.

For example, Milton Hydro, which is run as an independent for-profit entity, took in revenues of 11.5 million last year and spent 9.4 million, with the difference paid as a dividend to the company's sole shareholder: the Town of Milton. Transit on the other hand is an important service that recoups only a small portion of its costs in fares, but that too was laid out in terms of cost vs. monies recouped through fares.

The whole presentation was like that, broken down department by department: sports facilities, parks, road maintenance, by-law enforcement, etc., with simple expenses and revenues for each. Money in, money out.

Belvedere should write a book: "Town Management for Dummies".

As I sat there soaking all this in and taking notes here and there, a couple of things struck me. One was that it would be nice to see all this information presented in just this form to everybody in town every year, not just a room full of business Brahmans.

The second was that Belvedere's underlying theme of "running the Town like a business" sounded awfully familiar. And then I remembered: that was Hazel McCallion's mantra.

As an underlying principle, of course, running a town like a business makes obvious sense. Money in, money out - how else would you run it? But putting the emphasis on the Town as a business avoids what may be a more important question: exactly what kind of business should a town be run like? A family store? A corporate shell? A non-profit organization? Should the focus be on providing services or on minimizing costs? And what is the appropriate balance?

I'll leave that one with you for now.

Last night was a night of firsts.

Most notably, it was my first community meet & greet, hosted by my neighbour Joan who was kind enough to invite myself and a group of women from the neighbourhood to her lovely home for coffee, conversation, and homemade cookies. Joan lives just a few blocks up the street from me, so I decided to walk.

Which lead to my very first campaign-related injury.

Yep, just a few doors from my house I hit a patch of ice and went down on my left knee. Hard. But I'm a trooper, so after taking a moment to regroup I set off down the street again, bruised but undaunted.

I think I'll be adding "mandatory sidewalk salting" to my platform.

Joan wanted to keep things casual, so she had asked folks to just turn up any time after 6:30. It gave me a chance to talk to people one on one as well as in a group, and gave everyone the opportunity to ask questions and discuss their concerns.

Those concerns ran the gamut from transit access to storm drain upgrades to off-leash dogs at the Fairgrounds. But one issue was at the top of everyone's list: the loss of businesses and services from our neighbourhood.

Happily, that's at the top of my list as well.

While discussing the causes and the possible solutions to this problem, I began talking about the Infill and Intensification Study that will soon be presented to Council. I've spent a fair bit of time talking about this plan, on my Sprawlville blog and to people in general. The plan outlined in the study is, in my opinion, an excellent one, and would address many of the problems that have stemmed from a decade of unbalanced and sprawling development that has left our downtown core - and our ward - isolated, stagnant, and rapidly hollowing out.

The trick will be to make sure it actually happens and doesn't wind up like so many other well-intentioned plans: just a list of friendly suggestions, roundly ignored because there are no mechanisms or incentives in place to make it a reality.

As luck would have it, I have a plan for that too. And the people I spoke to last night seemed to like what they heard.

Thanks again to HearSay for allowing me to launch my campaign at their clinic. And to my endlessly patient husband for putting up with having his picture taken.