Stop The Bike Lane Boondoggle
Hot on the heels of the unnecessary and wasteful "carbon budget", the City of Edmonton has another brilliant idea - spending $100 million on more bike lanes.
Yes, you read that right - $100 MILLION.
$100 million of spending, requested by Mayor Sohi, and approved as an amendment to the budget by a 9-4 vote on Friday.
Here's who voted in favour:
Mayor Amarjeet Sohi, and Councillors Erin Rutherford, Aaron Paquette, Keren Tang, Ashley Salvador, Andrew Knack, Anne Stevenson, Michael Janz, and Jo-Anne Wright.
And here's who voted against:
Councillors Tim Cartmell, Sarah Hamilton, Karen Principe, and Jennifer Rice.
At a time when Edmontonians are already facing record increases in property taxes, Council must be delusional if they think this boondoggle is the absolute most important thing the City should be spending our hard-earned taxpayer money on!
Sohi even has the gall to claim that this amendment is intended to help with the affordability crisis!
But the $100 million he wants to spend on Bike Lanes is almost 5 times the amount he wants to spend on affordable housing.
In fact, it’s almost double the City's annual snow-clearing budget!
As if that weren’t bad enough, the City is already in so much debt that they had to vote to raise their own debt limit in order to keep spending.
$100 million is a really, really large amount of money.
Edmonton is dealing with encampments, the deaths of homeless people on the streets, women being turned away from crisis shelters due to lack of space, a mismanaged LRT line build that is years away from completion, and an outbreak of Shigella - a disease that normally only occurs in developing countries.
We have third-world conditions in a modern city, and the Mayor’s priority is bike lanes?
Budget discussions are continuing this week, so there’s still time to have this amendment reversed and this ridiculous spending removed from the budget.
If you agree that $100 million is too much money to spend on bike lanes, please sign our petition, asking Council to change its mind and Stop The Bike Lane Boondoggle!
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This is what happens when no proper vetting process is in place to determine IQ, (business economics credentials) , common-sense-Ability, etc., etc., of those decision makers handling the spending of large sums of money that is not theirs… Goal is not to plow the city into the ground.
Citizen taxpayers end up paying the hefty price (Oh hey! no worries! simply tax the citizens more!!) for ridiculous-ideological spending – not to mention the salaries that attach to those responsible for making such stupid money-wasting decisions.
This ‘existing’ system is problematic. It needs a complete dismantling and restructuring to where citizen taxpayers (the awake!) Step Up, and start using their power to voice how, where and on what their monies are most needed and best served to be spent, for the good of all. This should not be left up to individuals bent on ideological garbage via being woke-schwabbie indoctrinated , esg [netted fish], and climate-change [hoax] believers
- to touch on a few hot spot topics of these days ‘current climate’ -While other cities have decided to or are planning to remove their bike lanes (ie; having realized their-big$$-mistake) we have city-council members+ who don’t know how to learn from mistakes already made by other cities. Perhaps they just don’t read the news , the real news … perhaps they are too busy watching CdnBSCorporation propaganda …
Read, dig, pay attention to the dots and how they connect, who is beholden to whom … read between the lines and discern the reasons for why we have so many problems. It isn’t hard to figure out. Simply search meaningful accomplishments vs. gum flapping.