ZIMON, Michael

All answers take into account that every policy doesn't stand on its own. One policy change can and does affect many other parts of the city's policies and budget. Put a freeze on hiring at City Hall.

Yes to the question on City manager.

Yes to the third question. (establishing fixed-term, renewable contracts )

The city budget has increased from 37 million to 53 million in a dozen years! 1 1/2 times. Controlling property tax increases is contingent on how much the city spends on things that it doesn't have to spend money on. If you've been inside City Hall lately you would see that when they put up new walls they didn't use $15 sheet drywall. They use $2,000 a sheet of tempered glass for all the walls and doors. What other business in Owen Sound is this palatial? Was this necessary? No. They also spent a couple million dollars in turning a back alley and a riverfront into....a back alley and a riverfront. A back alley that nobody uses except delivery vehicles. And when do they do these things? 2 years after the election and two years before the next election when everybody's asleep. City Hall did need some work. It doesn't give them carte blanche to spend over a million dollars on glass walls, and who knows what it cost to put in the terrarium on the front and another one on the back of City Hall for having meetings. They have meeting rooms in the basement. And this is after they said we cannot afford a new city hall. Two years later they basically built a new city hall. The council had their priorities wrong. And told us they saved us 3 million because it's only 8 million, and a new city hall would be 11 million. When city hall was built in 1962 after the former one burnt down, ironically right beside the fire department, they over engineered it and they overbuilt it and it was quite controversial. But they did this so that they could add four more stories on top of it, because by the year 2000 Owen Sound would be 50,000 people because of its good rail lines coming into the city and the best natural harbour on the Great Lakes, and the industrial lands already for more industry to move in.

Yes, yes, and there's a local business out in Leith that would come in and go through the whole corporation of the city of Owen Sound to find ways to trim costs, on contingency basis, so no money put up front, and the ways that we implement, 10% of the costs saved would go to the company that outlined them. This has been suggested to City Hall before, and the mayor turned it down. Why?

The only time you hear from councillers and the mayoral candidates is during election time. We have local radio, a local newspaper, two local online news outlets, and many social media outlets. They can and should use all of these to get the message out with plenty of time for people to respond. And this is news. So they don't have to pay for advertising. How many current councillors have a Facebook page? Do you think they really want us to know what's going on between elections? I tried to find out a breakdown of all the costs associated with "updating" City Hall and it can't be found. Openness and transparency is not what they claim.

This is a question that anybody that answers it who offers up solutions that aren't part of the usual narrative will get skewered. They will be accused of lacking empathy. Fixing the homelessness and the addiction problems are going to take more than empathy. And they've been saying for years that it can be fixed. But it hasn't. We still have people in the fentanyl fold on downtown streets. Either walking or laying down. We have people openly doing drugs and the police have turned a blind eye to it. If they're breaking the law they should be charged. Anybody else would be. To fix this problem is going to take an awful lot of money. The are 250 square ft. homes the Chinese are building for $5,000 each. Add the electrical and water hook ups. Two million. Now if we had some industrial land left because it seems to me the city is turned it all into residential land and it has all filled up with housing, 200 hundred of these would actually be cheaper in the long run to put the homeless in, with conditions. (It's better money spent than what the two blocks of downtown got recently. Or spending 16 million on a new police station, or 15 million to join the art gallery with the library. Two recent proposals.) They should be in a program to get clean, so that they can get themselves together and look after their personal hygiene and get help for their addictions. Get their lives and dignity back. Then they can be employable. The trouble with this is some people are going to say that they don't want a mini village in their neighborhood so that's a bridge that needs to be crossed. And there are others that say you can't force someone to get into a recovery program for their addictions because that goes against basic rights. Not forcing anyone to do anything! Just asking if they want to get clean and stop being homeless. So that's another bridge that has to be crossed. But they both can be. And how do we prevent this solution from making Owen Sound an Ontario-wide Mecca? We can't help 100 more. Or 1000. Is this far fetched? Look at the status quo. We have to make bold decisions that actually make a difference. Or our town keeps dying a slow death. Every policy we enact, affects everything else.

Put a moratorium on rezoning industrial land to residential land or retail commercial land. Owen Sound is only 27 square kilometers. We should not have taken away any industrial land on the harbourfront including Black Clawson Kennedy, RCA, and both health buildings.

We can't go back and change these things but we can stop it from happening again. We have the best natural harbour on the Great Lakes with access to cost effective shipping to 100 million people. Plus ocean going vessels. We should be promoting this louder and louder. To encourage businesses to set up here. City Hall will say, oh, we've tried. What they were doing obviously didn't work so they should have tried something different or more powerful. When they built the new YMCA the mayor of the time said it was going to attract big industrialists to Owen Sound. Until we can get downtown cleaned up, so that people feel safe and comfortable there again, and the main streets are bustling, who from outside of town would want to come here and invest millions of dollars building a factory? That would employ 150 people, from the managers to the clerical staff, to the technicians, to the skilled and unskilled labourers injecting about 50 million dollars into the local economy annually. A city cannot survive with just retail workers supporting other retail workers.

A few years ago we heard that the art gallery was going to be sold to private entities. Lately we've been hearing that they want to spend $16 million dollars to physically attach it, join it at the hip with the library so the people don't have to even walk outside between the two. This money would be better spent putting a big dent helping the homeless and addicted. And/or lower taxes. So that we don't create more homeless. Yes, it all has to be transparent. They just give annual budgets that keep going up and there is no breakdown from department to department and inside the departments. If only they had accountants working inside City Hall. When the bidding was open for the city to decide on who was going to build the new wastewater treatment plant it came down to the two lowest bids that were both identical! When you are bidding in the 40 million dollar range what are the odds that this could happen? Without some whispers shared. It's time we switched to the OPP for our policing. The city police are now asking for 16 million to build a new station. The current one is not falling down. It seems that whatever they ask for, they get. We could save millions of dollars, literally. There are some that say that cities that have switched to the OPP are paying more once the initial contracts are up. But, for example, Owen Sound is paying a third more than Orangeville is paying for their OPP police department, and Orangeville is on its third contract since they switched. And Orangeville is a bigger city, 33,000 compared to Owen Sound 22,000. Orangeville's policing costs work out to roughly $200-$230 per resident, while Owen Sound's are roughly $400-$440+ per resident (using the mid-range budget and population figures). Absolute costs in Owen Sound are higher despite a smaller population. Almost 10 million dollars compared to Orangeville's 6 million.

see response to Question 7

In 2013 the mayor was told about the same thing, and the response was, are you kidding? I guess they have too much free time on their hands if they are doing things like this. Why is this happening again?