How is it that a town that created the beautiful downtown Main Street let other parts of Main Street (and all of Steeles Ave) turn into such an eyesore?

Milton just went through an intensification study.  The final report will be available online here.  If executed well, this can do wonders for Milton.  But Milton has gone through other ambitious exercises (Eco Village) with no results.  The key is to make sure that this does not turn into one of those exercises.

My view is that turning Main Street from Bronte to James Snow into the following is potentially a good thing :-

However, I don’t want to see any more of these in Milton:

The study proposes respecting surrounding low-density neighbourhoods by staging heights :-

Another trick is to make sure that zoning is handled well and respected.  Only then can we create walk-able neighbourhoods:

You can see the core urban area map here:

I would personally continue intensification all the way to James Snow, if not further East.  There is a second GO station planned at Trafalgar.  Maintaining a higher population density along Main Street between these stations will help greatly with transit. 

The Thompson / Main GO station is one reason why I don’t think the central library should have gone at the Thompson / Derry intersection. That was an ideal spot for a residential area from where residents could walk to the GO station. 

Now that you have my thoughts on this, what do you think?

I got ready to go to the 7:30pm Council meeting today. At 7:10pm the babysitting deal fell through.  It’s the third Council meeting I had to miss because I could not find babysitters (my wife has classes on Monday nights this semester). 

How hard can it be to stream these meetings online?  Put a $500 camera connected to a computer and stream the video.  Heck I will go set it up for the town. 

It’s 2010!  I was video chatting with family ten years ago.  Talk about being antiquated!

Two pillars of accountability are answerability and enforcement. 

Answerability requires public officials to provide information about their actions and justify them to the public.  This requires both accessibility and transparency.  Some public officials tend to be inaccessible.  Very few ever state their values in writing.  If they are not both accessible and transparent, then they do not wish to be answerable. 

Enforcement implies that an institution responsible for accountability can sanction the offending party or individual.  Often this is absent as well. Except in extreme cases, voters have to wait until the next election.

Democracy cannot function without true accountability.  Even if there is a democratic process, without accountability it’s not a real democracy.  

I am committed to completely accountability.

A web feed (news feed, RSS feed, syndicated feed) allows users to subscribe to frequently updated content. All blogs, all news sites and most personal websites have feeds readers can subscribe to.  It takes the need to frequently check the site away.  You get notified when there’s new content.

Why does milton.ca not have feeds for every subsection (it does for the main page.  Even if you are in a sub-section, you only get RSS for the main page)?  I want to see the list of all registered candidates for the 2010 municipal election. I do not want to have to check the document every day. Instead, I want to be able to subscribe to the feed, so I get notified in my RSS reader (I use Internet Explorer for it) whenever they change that page. 

[Shameless plug: you can subscribe to my RSS feeds by either clicking the feed icon in your browser or by clicking this link, if you use an external application.]

A comment was posted in response to my post: What makes a good councillor.  The main question was:

…what do you think a councillor should do when a group of his/her constituents asks for support for something that is in opposition to his/her principles?

You can read the comment and my response here.

It’s not their views on policies as much as their principles (see here for the difference).  More importantly, a councillor needs to listen to his or her constituents and represent their interests in the Council.  An inaccessible councillor cannot possibly be a good representative. Unfortunately, we have a couple of these in Milton. 

Here is a depressing news related to my previous post on retirement saving.  An RBC survey found that only 35% of Canadians will contribute to RRSP in 2009.  Worse, 45% of those above 55 are not doing any retirement planning whatsoever.  Worse yet, 32% of Canadians have not even started saving for retirement yet.

It’s the realm of Federal (or at least Provincial) government but I am a big fan of some forced savings in this case (CPP and Old Age won’t cut it). 

Vieux-Québec has done a great job maintaining its unique character.  Can Milton do something to achieve same level of success? 

Milton still has a lot of growth left.  As many new neighbourhoods get created, town planners have an opportunity to define the character of the entire future city.  What can Milton do to achieve a more European-esque look and feel? 

Essentially look at the main historic downtown and think about ways to achieve the same feel, likely via townhomes and 3-4 storey condos, on all arterial roads like Britannia, Loius St. Laurent, James Snow (it’s too late for Derry, unfortunately). 

Please ignore the missing filename error.

This eyesore is in Mississauga near my parents’ house in an otherwise low-rise neighbourhood.  How is this aesthetically pleasing. 

Based on Halton’s experience, it will cost around $30,000 in yearly operating expenses to “web stream” Council meetings (thanks Tim for pointing it out).  That means we’ll be able to watch council meetings, live, from the comfort of our homes. 

To put it in perspective, $30,000 represents 0.04% of Milton’s operating budget (basically a rounding error). 

Worth it?  Totally!  Milton needs to get more involved in Social Networking anyway. This is a great way to start.

Correction: The actual mill rate increase is 1.3%.  That’s because the properties are assessed at a higher rate.  End result for us homeowners is same.  3.24% increase on a $350,000 house or a 1.3% increase on a house that’s assessed much higher. 
Milton had a budget meeting last night. I wasn’t able to make it (I e-mailed my comments to different councillors), but Mike Cluett was there, sending play-by-play. 

If I understand it correctly (will edit it as details become clearer), then the extension of Louis St Laurent to Tremaine is added in the 2010 Capital Budget.  I couldn’t be more excited.  Scott neighbourhood (HVE) is completely grid-locked with construction on Derry and Tremaine.  Another exit off the community will help a great deal.  Since it’s part of the Capital Budget, the money comes from developers.

In addition, the Transit budget got approved as well. That is another good news, because now Scott can get an express bus service.

All-in-all, it came down to a 3.24% increase in Mill Rate, a major part of which will go towards increases in staff salaries (personally, I think it’s insane to give salary increases in this climate, but what do I know).  Someone should tell them that there’s a bad recession out there.  3.24% translates to $8.39 for every $100,000 in assessment.  For a $350,000 house, it means an increase of about $30 / year, or just under $2.50 per month. 

1% of Milton’s operating budget property taxes is spent on operating and maintaining street lights (another way of saying that out of $1 paid in property taxes to the Town, 1¢ goes towards the operating cost of street lights). 

Is it just me does Milton have a lot of them in some places?  Thompson between the Metro plaza and Derry is lit like a Christmas tree.  Are all these lights really needed?  On some spots 3 lights in a row are blown out and there’s no visible reduction in illumination, that’s how many lights they have.  I’ll take a picture and will post it here. 

Does anyone else feel the same?  Does your town bombard streets with way too many lights?

Is there any Town as small as Milton that has as many traffic lights on major arterial roads disrupting traffic flow?  Driving through Thompson from Derry to Main is an agonizing exercise in patience.  Sadly, Derry on Western part of Milton is turning into the same thing.  Tremaine, Savoline (coming soon), Scott and Bronte.  That’s four lights in about a km and a half.  There’s a busy rail track blocking traffic in between that I did not mention.

Seriously, did these subdivisions need both Scott Blvd and Savoline Blvd? Couldn’t just one connector road in the middle of the subdivision have served the purpose?   It’s not just traffic flow, it makes transit harder too.

It would’ve been better to build connections to Tremaine, Main, Loius St Laurent and Britannia up front to distribute traffic load.  

Milton Canadian Champion Article: Derry Rd. underpass could be built sooner than planned.

Snippets:

Residents of west Milton who flooded the e-mail inboxes of regional councillors earlier this year asking for Halton Region to speed up construction of an underpass on Derry Road might be getting what they asked for.

and

“I am relieved and delighted to hear that,” said Milton resident Zeeshan Hamid, who began a petition asking for the underpass in August. “The underpass cannot happen too soon. I hope the council will continue to consider this need a priority.”

but

Wanting to make sure Regional staff weren’t recommending the project be pushed up due to public pressure, Dennison asked Zamojc if the underpass would come at the expense of other higher priority projects

finally

The proposed 10-year capital budget forecast envisions construction beginning in 2012, subject to council’s approval.

So keep up the pressure by signing the petition until the budget is approved!

Something that should be part of the Urban plan:  controlling sound pollution.

The subdivision North of Derry and West of CN track has houses right next to the rail track. No sound barrier, not even a fence. This should simply be disallowed in Milton’s Urban Plan. The fact that a builder is allowed to do this is beyond baffling for me, and a proof that Milton’s Urban Plan is inadequate.

This is not sound urban planning (get it?)