Ground Hog Day!

Those words in a tweet from Councillor Chad Collins during the middle of three public budget presentations centred around parking meters in Waterdown and to some extent on tax increases in Flamborough.
Look, today was a mixed bag of issues a heavy bag mind you, so here are some of the highlights.
Those parking meters are likely toast in downtown Waterdown. A motion will likely be put forward by the local councillor Judy Partridge and based on today's sympathy around the table will likely be passed easily.
A proposal to move forward on design work for a new central Police Investigative Services Division Headquarters costing 1.5 million to be split by the City and the Police Service was approved as a prudent step toward ultimately building a 15 million dollar Forensic Services Facility. There was some push back however. Councillors although acknowledging the need for the facility wanted to know how the heck the 15 million dollars would be found and where. You see this capital request is currently not part of the 10 year capital project plan for the city. There was concern that taking on any additional debt in addition to that ten year list might push Hamilton's debt to a point where our credit rating might be impacted negatively, in other words costing us more to borrow. Staff was directed to come up with suggestions on where and more importantly when this 15 million expense could be injected into that long list of capital projects. The sentiment around the table this day seems to be projects in my ward better not get bumped back. In other words, no jumping the queue for our Police. By the way their first choice for this new facility is bounded by  Cannon, Mary, Catherine and Rebecca.
In this blog I hope you'll indulge me for I am leaving the lead story for last which is the presentation regarding those companies who would love to manage our HECFI facilities, Hamilton Place, the Hamilton Convention Centre and Copps Coliseum, something I wrote about on Tuesday.
Before that however a couple of interesting numbers. Did you know that in the Golden Horseshoe alone gross farm receipts total just over 1.4 billion dollars with 222.3 million of that coming from the City of Hamilton?
Did you know that in Hamilton alone the Agra-business including farming, processing and storage is worth well over a billion dollars? It is one of Hamilton's best kept secrets. The General Issues Committee received the presentation and report from reps of the Golden Horseshoe Agriculture and Agra-Food Strategy.
Now to the final big issue of the day.
As you know six different groups have shown interest in HECFI properties, three of them local and only interested in one entity of the package with three multinational entertainment groups willing to take over management of all three facilities. A representative of KPMG made this initial presentation basically explaining who the proponents were and what their preference was. Now the hard work the nitty gritty of crunching numbers begins with a report back to the GIC April 4th. Before I leave this subject an explanation as to some of the push back from councillors led by Ward 4's Sam Merulla who was one of the key figures in pushing for a complete HECFI review. For him there needs to be significant mitigation of current liabilities, in other words this process must lead to savings for taxpayers. One other significant comment came from Ward 5's Chad Collins who asked city staff to make sure all ideas are explored including hybrid solutions. By this he meant maybe a local group might run the Convention Centre for example with one of the multi nationals taking on the entertainment facilities of Copps Coliseum and Hamilton Place. As mentioned we learn more April 4th.
Tomorrow on "For the Record, Council Edition" Ward 6 councillor Tom Jackson is my guest beginning at 5pm and airing at the top of the hour throughout the evening.