4.5%

City of Guelph 2008 Operating and Capital budgets highlights:
20 Minute bus service
Funding for Hospice Wellington and Guelph General Hospital’s MRI
Increased life cycle reserve

Infrastructure shortfall needs $25M injection

The following article appeared in the January 31 edition of the Guelph Mercury: 
The city would have to raise taxes by about 18 per cent to pay off its infrastructure gap in a single year.
Of course, that would never happen.
But it goes a long way toward illustrating just how big the problem is.
Councillors heard last night [...]

Priority Setting Process Questions and Answers

Q. How did you arrive at this list of priorities?
A. The list of priorities was derived from an open review of over 200 existing, pending and new project priorities which account for approximately 10-20% of the city’s resources and capacity. The two review meetings took place in the fall.
Meeting 1: October 19, 2007 at the [...]

Ward 2 Town Hall Meeting Update

Councillor Beard and myself would like to thank all of those who attended our first Ward 2 Town Hall meeting. It was a great success with approximately 80 people in attendance. We would also like to thank our valued staff for their participation.
Martin Lavictoire and Wayne Galliher presented an overview on Guelph’s water conservation programs, [...]

DC’s and the South End Recreational Centre

There is a growing and very vocal number of residents living in the south end of Guelph advocating for a new recreational centre to be built as soon as possible.
Currently, the City of Guelph has in it’s capital budget, construction of a new south end rec centre sometime in 2014. The projected cost of the rec centre is [...]

Wastewater pipeline

I attended the Wastewater Treatment Master Plan ‘public information centre’ on October 24th and was shocked to see that one of the proposed ‘feasible’ solutions to Guelph’s sewage capacity problem is a pipeline to the Great Lakes (either Lake Erie, Ontario or Huron). It was a long hard fight to get a mega-pipeline removed as [...]

Street sweeping

This staff response follows up on a question as to why the City sweeps it’s streets:
Street sweeping is something that contributes to the protection of the water quality of the river system. It really has little to do with ‘washing the road”. We do use water during this activity to keep dust down (which can [...]