"Like a Business?" The Jackson Park Bridge Folly Exposed

The Lions Club was packed to capacity last Wednesday night with citizens eager to hear the campaign roars of five would-be kings of the Peterborough jungle. Examiner coverage is here.

Keen observers may notice that our mayoral competition parallels Toronto’s.

Like the two-headed Ford beast, our incumbent Daryl Bennett is a local family-business millionaire with a father figure who did time as an MPP at Queen’s Park. Both the Fords and Bennett managed to get themselves on the wrong side of their local police chiefs, while trumpeting their ability to run city hall “like a business” and attempting to control city council as they would their company boardroom.

With Ford it was subways, subways, subways.

With Bennett it’s parkway, parkway, parkway.

Alan Wilson’s career in the big corporate world of Quaker is closer to John Tory’s with Rogers. Like Tory, Wilson unsuccessfully sought a PC seat in the Ontario Legislature, and now seeks to paint himself a centrist in a bid to take a mayor’s job. Wilson aims to leverage votes from Bennett by rejecting the Jackson Park bridge while supporting the Parkway through Northcrest. At the Lions Club he tried to appear progressive by proposing a pedestrians-only section of George Street – an unlikely scenario which would require changing the one-way traffic flow along Water and George.

At the other end of the table was Maryam Monsef. Although a rookie, Monsef resembles Olivia Chow in many ways. Both women came to Canada from Asia as children and had to earn their social capital from scratch. Both have a background in grass-roots activism, are aiming for the progressive vote, and have solid support in the downtown and among female voters.

Monsef’s smart growth campaign platform came out on Friday, including an explicitly No Parkway stance  – a position which makes more sense from a business perspective than Bennett’s or Wilson’s. It's in line with Ontario’s commitment to increasing urban density, recently demonstrated by legislation raising the maximum wood-frame building height to six storeys from four, and a survey showing prospective homeowners now prefer walkable neighbourhoods to car-dependent ones. 

On Wednesday night, Bennett reiterated his commitment to run city hall “like a business." In reality, city hall is not a business designed to serve a small group of customers and make money for its owners. It’s a non-profit corporation designed to serve everyone. A business is successful when it turns a profit. A city government cannot turn a profit.

A business can also succeed by expanding its operations. Here's the root of the enthusiasm of Bennett and his south-end buddy Dan McWilliams for suburban sprawl. More land, more taxpayers, and more roads for Peterborough is their civic version of more trucks and more clients.

But wait – studies in the U.S. have shown that residential development is a losing proposition the way it’s done in North America. Development charges for residential subdivisions aren’t actually enough to cover the costs of providing the services they require. 

This is the painful reality residents are waking up to in Mississauga, Ontario’s capital of fast-paced suburban sprawl. Outgoing mayor Hazel McCallion survived decades in office uncontested because the city was continually able to use new development charges to pay for the servicing costs of the previous developments. But what happens when the land runs out? Mississauga is now entirely built-up, and residents are on the hook for serious tax increases just to balance the books.

If money-losing suburban sprawl and a further $100 million dollar subsidy for developers in the form of the Parkway count as running city hall “like a business,” it’s a business that would be going belly-up in the world of commerce.

Which brings us to self-interest. Bennett and McWilliams own businesses that make money using public roads. Trucks, buses and cabs owned by these two millionaires will have new roads to drive and more customers to serve if the Parkway and the suburban sprawl gets built as planned. By that time, the two of them will be long gone from city hall – but their families will still be profiting from the public subsidy, which we’ll all still be paying.

Even without the Jackson Park bridge, the Parkway and the north-end subdivisions will be money-losers for the city in both the short and long term. The bridge itself is so far-fetched a proposition that no sensible businessperson could seriously entertain it.

Tell anyone who might be tempted by pro-Parkway pie-in-the-sky dreams to consider a few basic facts about the Jackson Park bridge that don’t require an engineering degree to understand.

 The bridge would be nearly half a kilometre long – double the span of the Parkhill and Hunter Street bridges across the Otonabee River, as you can see on these maps. 

It would also be more than twice as high. Just to cross a 12-foot wide creek. What engineer thought it was a good idea to cross the ravine at its widest and deepest point?

Adding to the folly, the bridge would be only a few hundred meters away from the existing Parkhill bridge which crosses the same ravine at a much narrower point and lower elevation.

The gorgeous Parkhill Bridge over Jackson Creek

If someone proposed reducing traffic on the Hunter Street bridge by building much longer bridge at Sherbrooke Street for $40 million, they’d be laughed out of town. Of course, that didn’t stop transportation consultants employed by the city 25 years ago from making this very recommendation.

And if the $40 million minimum price-tag for the Jackson Park bridge isn’t enough to give the dreamers sticker shock, remind them how frequently the Hunter Street and Parkhill bridges across the Otonabee have needed expensive repairs -- $13 million for Hunter Street just a few years ago. Then imagine how much more challenging it would be to repair and maintain a bridge twice as long and twice as high.

Cogeco hosts a cable-TV mayoral debate October 6^th at 7 pm, as reported by the Examiner. Email your questions for the candidates to tvcptbo@cogeco.com. Make a video clip of yourself asking the question to increase your chances of it actually being used. CHEX will do theirs Oct. 20. 

You can see as far as Cavan south from the meadow above Medical Drive

Bennett may well get re-elected as mayor. As Torontonians learned this past term, however, the mayor is just one vote. A mayor can’t drive our city toward financial and ecological bankruptcy without a team of sycophantic councillors.

In upcoming posts, we’ll look at city council races ward by ward with a focus on sustainability.

... and Selwyn north across the huge ravine the bridge is supposed to span

What’s Real Estate Got To Do With It? Way Too Much.

Tonight at 7 pm the Realtors and Home Builders host an all-candidates meeting at the Lions’ Club in East City. The Realtors have a history of holding well-attended, well-organized all-candidates meetings during election campaigns at all levels.

In attendance will be mayor Daryl Bennett and his latest challenger for the position, former provincial PC candidate Alan Wilson, a long-time adviser to embattled MP Dean Del Mastro. With a strong start to her campaign, Maryam Monsef has quickly gained support among those looking for an alternative to business-as-usual and her name can be seen on many front lawns around town.

Of the three, it appears that only Monsef lives in Peterborough. Bennett and Wilson reportedly reside on properties outside the city limits.

Does it not bother anyone that neither Bennett nor Wilson therefore pay any residential property tax to the city they govern, or propose to govern? Would we accept an Ontario Premier who lived in Montreal? A Prime Minister who resided in Buffalo?

Bennett’s family is involved in the realty business as well as the transportation business. If campaign contributions are anything to go by, he also has connections in the world of real estate developers. Century 21 and Cleary Homes kicked cash into Bennett’s initial campaign for mayor in 2010, as did Melody Homes principal Saverio Montemarano through his company Liberty Greens.

Montemarano was revealed by the Examiner in 2008 to be behind the unpopular plan to put a hotel and condominium complex on Little Lake which Del Mastro actively promoted while refusing to tell the public who had proposed it.

Montemarano and his associates in the Cortellucci family in York Region also control Bromont Homes and a corporation called Mocor, which contributed money to the election campaigns of Len Vass and Keith Riel in 2010.

York University professor Robert MacDermid has been studying patterns of campaign contributions in Ontario for 20 years. In 2000, he determined that the development industry was “by far the largest sector” supporting the provincial PC party under Mike Harris, accounting for 60% of a staggering $50 million given the Harris government under his first mandate from 1995 to 1999. Many who financially backed Harris were beneficiaries of corporate tax breaks his government enacted.

The Toronto Star reported that “Large development firms owned by Nick Cortellucci and Saverio Montemarano donated almost $670,000” to the party during this period (July 24, 2000). While Harris was in power, he tried to arrange a bargain-price sale of Crown land near Temiskaming to the Cortellucci Group in what became known as the Adams Mine Scandal, treated in-depth by Kingston blogger Emily Dee. 

 

More recently, Corellucci and Montemarano helped get former Barrie mayor Dave Apsden in trouble with his council and constituents when they took him with them on a business trip to China in 2007 after having made financial contributions to his campaign. Cortellucci and Montemarano reportedly owned dozens of properties in Barrie and a hundred acres waiting to be developed in neighbouring Innisfil Township. Links to Barrie news sources via Councillor John Brassard’s blog tell the story. 

Accepting campaign contributions from Montemarano isn’t the only thing Aspden and Bennett have in common. Aspden also managed to get himself in hot water with his conduct on the Police Services Board in his area, and spent $15,000 to defend himself in a case with the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, as reported by the Barrie Advance (March 2, 2010). Later that year, on the same night that Peterborough elected Bennett mayor, Aspden was soundly defeated in his bid for re-election in Barrie, attracting only 1200 votes.

Melody Homes, of which Montemarano is a principal, owns two big plots of land in Peterborough and is apparently anxious to develop them. One is on Parkhill Road West in the Ravenswood area, and the other is across the Jackson Creek wetland on Lily Lake Road. The City of Peterborough rushed the Lily Lake development plan through this past April just a few days ahead of new provincial planning guidelines. They gave the go-ahead for a massive new residential area on the city’s northwest fringes that is utterly out-of-step with the province’s call to redevelop and increase population density in the city core, and contradicts basic principles of urban sustainability. 

Approving the Lily Lake plan also meant that council had to approve the widening of Fairbairn into a high-capacity arterial road, which the Parkway plan that was approved just a few months before had supposedly sought to avoid, and which many area residents aren't at all happy with.

The Lily Lake plan is currently being appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board over its incompatibility with growth policy and deficiencies in the planning process. A hearing is set for early November at city hall, shortly after the election.

  

MacDermid’s more recent studies of campaign financing show a continued pattern of developer contributions to municipal election campaigns in the growth areas around Toronto. You can watch MacDermid on The Agenda discussing the nature of the relationships between real estate developers and municipal government.

Will anyone press the candidates on this issue at the Realtors Association meeting tonight?

Flat-Earthers Aim to Flood Northcrest with Water and Cars, Cut Recreation; Northcrest Candidates to Meet on Oct. 8

As the autumnal equinox approaches, climate change activists are aiming to bring 100,000 people out to march the streets of New York ahead of this week’s United Nations climate change summit. The “People’s Climate March” is just one of 2700 events planned worldwide, including a rally here in Peterborough on Sunday in Millennium Park, just before the Purple Onion local harvest festival.

Meanwhile, at Peterborough city hall, our elected representatives and some city staff still think it’s 1970, getting ready to pave over one-third of the greenspace in Northcrest while pandering to developers who want to build more car-dependent subdivisions at the city’s northern fringes, miles away from employment, shopping, and community centers.

To make matters worse, the ward’s only public indoor recreational facility, Northcrest Arena, is about to be retired, and city staff want to replace it with a new twin pad arena at the opposite end of town, as reported by the Examiner. That’s one way to create demand for the Parkway – put all the new houses in the north end, and all the recreation in the south.

The plan to turn the Parkway Trail which runs through Northcrest into a four-lane road is a prime example of the Flat Earth thinking we’ve come to expect from city hall. Councillors, planners, and some residents look at a map of Northcrest and imagine a sleek shortcut across the ward down from Cumberland through Hilliard and Chemong over to Fairbairn. 

The truth is that this route was planned for a road only because it formed the northwest edge of the city back before the baby-boom when planners were looking for a western bypass around town. In fact, the terrain is far from suitable for a roadway, a prime reason why it was never built.

Overlooking WalMart and the rest of the city from Milroy Drive

Looking up from Parkway Trail to Milroy

Northcrest comes by its name honestly, as do Highland Heights and Edmison Heights schools. Whereas Ashburnham, Town, and Otonabee Wards occupy the river valley, Northcrest rises rapidly along the axis of Chemong Road, the shortest route from Lake Chemong to downtown Peterborough and Little Lake, used as a canoe portage prior to becoming a road. Anyone who’s tried to bike up to Portage Place from downtown knows how steep and unrelenting that slope is. 

In fact, Tower Hill is an astonishing 80 meters above downtown Peterborough.

The Parkway Trail essentially runs along the side of the slope. The area is always wet, even in summer, creating a linear wetland alongside the trail inhabited by wildflowers and grasses taller than we are.

Remember the big flood ten years ago? Chemong Road turned into a waterfall. So much of Northcrest is paved over that the remaining ground had no chance of absorbing the rainwater. Anyone living near lower Chemong or below paid the price. That was a once-a-century storm – the kind of storm that scientists tell us we could experience once-a-decade from now on thanks to climate change.

When the city allowed WalMart to pave over a chunk of land immediately north of and above the Parkway Trail intersection with Chemong Road, planners failed to adequately consider the effect of this on water flow. After its construction, they had to build a large containment pond at the public’s expense to deal with the water.

Imagine how much bigger a water management headache will be caused if the city goes ahead and adds a 25 meter-wide roadway alongside the Parkway Trail for its entire length. The area to be covered over will make the WalMart property look like a postage stamp. Meanwhile, the city’s not waiting for the province’s approval – under Daryl Bennett, the greenspace near Hilliard is already being torn up for sewers.

Sewers going in on Parkway Trail at Hilliard

The Parkway Trail is the only natural area in Northcrest. Period. The ward’s only other greenspaces are athletic fields and the zoo’s picnic grounds.

City staff have been hiding from the public all summer the proposals that came in for partnerships with the city to build a replacement for Northcrest arena. Finally last week they announced their list – with Fleming College at the top of it. Yes, that’s right – city staff are recommending replacing Northcrest with an arena at the opposite end of the city. 

The southern parts of Peterborough already enjoy the Wellness Center, the Evinrude Center, the Memorial Center, the YMCA, and Del Crary Park. Ashburnham enjoys the Rotary Trail, Nicholls Oval, Rotary Park, Rogers Cove, Beavermead, and the Ecology Park.

What does Northcrest get? Car rides to the other parts of town. 

Open space at Chemong ripe for Rec Center

The sprawling lawn immediately below WalMart, right along the Parkway Trail on the east side of Chemong, would make a perfect site for a new community rec center that people could easily walk, bike, or bus to, but no one's apparently even thought about it.

Northcrest councillors, who are supposed to be on the lookout for ways to improve their community, seem to have been sleeping on the job for years.

An all candidates meeting for Northcrest is set for Wednesday October 8^th at 6:30 pm at the Leta Brownscombe Co-op at 243 Milroy Drive, behind Portage Place.

According to the Examiner, incumbent councillor Andrew Beamer won’t be there. So there’ll be plenty of time to test candidates Bill Templeman, Dave Haacke, Stephen Wright and Kathryn Eyre on their knowledge of Northcrest’s topography and ideas for recreational facilities.

Last-minute Candidates Thicken the Plot

Yesterday’s nomination deadline brought forth a host of last-minute entrants into municipal elections. The biggest surprise was Rob Ford, diagnosed only days before with an abdominal tumour, handing off his family’s hopeless bid to retain the mayor’s office in Toronto to his brother Doug and instead taking up the race for his old familiar spot representing north Etobicoke on council, which he’ll run from his hospital bed. Rob will likely get re-elected on his home turf, while Doug’s mayoral support will be a fraction of his brother would have had.

Back at home, Alan Wilson finally made good on rumours he would contest for the mayor’s office in Peterborough. Wilson, who first moved from Ireland to Peterborough more than thirty years ago, was an engineer at Quaker before getting active in local Conservative Party circles. He was the Progressive Conservative candidate in the provincial election of 2011, finishing with just over 15,000 votes. Jeff Leal was re-elected with more than 19,000 votes that year, while NDP candidate Dave Nickle picked up about 12,500.

A quick scan of the poll-by-poll results, however, show that much of Wilson’s support came from the county, as is usual for Conservative candidates. Leal finished far ahead of Wilson in almost every polling station in the city, and Nickle got more votes than Wilson in many of them. Then again, Wilson did have to carry the questionable Tim Hudak on his back through that campaign.

For comparison’s sake, Daryl Bennett was elected mayor in 2010 with 14,000 votes to Paul Ayotte’s 10,000. How many votes will it take to to get elected mayor this time, with more candidates and a potentially higher turnout?

Before and after his run for Queen's Park, Wilson acted as an adviser to MP Dean Del Mastro. Wilson told the Examiner that he’d been waiting for Del Mastro’s trial to be done before committing to the mayoral race. But with the verdict delayed until after election day, Wilson jumps into the campaign with the issue unresolved.

Would you run for public office while your ally and boss was on trial for fraud?

Stranger things have happened in Peterborough politics. Remember when Len Vass ran for mayor while he was engaged in legal action against the city? And Wilson isn't the only Del Mastro associate to brazenly seek election this year. Dean's former campaign manager Jeff Westlake is running for council in Monaghan Ward.

Camille Parent, the former Catholic school board trustee whose complaint about Bennett reportedly led to the mayor’s own legal issues with the police services board, registered this week as a candidate for city council for Otonabee Ward. Although he lives in Kawartha Lakes, Parent owns a business on Lansdowne, and so qualifies as a candidate. He joins Kim Zippel and Stephen Morgan in challenging incumbents Dan McWilliams and Lesley Parnell in Otonabee.

On the school board front, Kawartha Pine Ridge chair Diane Lloyd, who ran uncontested in Selwyn in 2010, looked to be on her way to a second straight acclamation until Bridgenorth resident Barry Mortin stepped up this week to run against her. Mortin was active in the Save PCVS lobby effort two years ago  during which tone-deaf KPR trustees with Lloyd at the helm managed to rub almost everyone who had to deal with them the wrong way.

In the city, last-minute candidate David Kittner joins Wayne Bonner in vying for the two KPR seats representing Peterborough. Long-standing trustee Roy Wilfong finally vacated his, while incumbent Rose Kitney seeks re-election.

The PCVS debacle and the looming Jackson Park bridge atrocity, both of which threaten the health of our city core, have at least had the effect of stimulating citizen interest in municipal affairs. We’ve got six candidates for mayor now – that's three times as many as 2010. Every ward has five or six candidates for council, most of them serious contenders.

But choice between candidates doesn’t mean much without intelligent debate. The Realtors and Homebuilders host their mayoral debate on Wednesday, September 24^th. Development interests will be prominent, so bring your tough questions about sustainability to challenge the status quo. 

Is anyone going to step up and organize local ward debates for our city councillors this time?

Meanwhile, our outgoing council finally takes a look at the Northcrest Arena replacement study next Monday. Whether we invest in a full-service recreational center for Northcrest or settle for the bare minimum because we've maxed out our credit to pave over our existing outdoor recreational space with the Parkway will be for our next council to decide -- after we decide on the next council. 

Another Inconvenient Truth: the Parkway is Irrelevant to our Transportation Future

It’s no secret that real estate developers have had a powerful influence on municipal governments in Ontario. That influence is largely responsible for the suburban sprawl that has swallowed up plenty of prime farmland and now challenges city councils and Queen’s Park in their efforts to keep up with its maintenance.

Developers make their profits buying undervalued property, building on it, and re-selling it to homeowners or commercial interests as quickly as possible. The cheapest and easiest land to build on has typically been around the rural fringes of cities, and there’s been no shortage of would-be homeowners lured by the idea of a brand-new house on a freshly-paved street with a lighter mortgage bite than properties in established neighbourhoods. And no shortage of corporations ready to plunk their cookie-cutter Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, and Royal Banks in seemingly endless rows along the main arteries.

Queen’s Park attempted to curb the sprawl with the Places to Grow Act in 2005. The legislation aimed to put strict limits on urban boundaries and encourage cities to increase the population of their central areas. It also aimed to take pressure off Toronto by considering Peterborough and other distant municipalities as part of the growth-region around it.

The unfortunate result of this well-intentioned plan has been a kind of “gold rush” on undeveloped land around Peterborough’s fringes. Suddenly, there were plans before council for a big new subdivision in the south-east near Bensfort Rd. and the 115 by-pass called Coldsprings. The area around Parkhill West up to Brealey Rd. has new projects breaking ground and will eventually be entirely filled in. Most of the land on Lily Lake Road, north of Jackson Park, has been bought up, some of it by Melody Homes. The city has already built the sewer system to service these, running a line under the TransCanada Trail through Jackson Park. The areas along Towerhill near Fairbairn at the city’s northern limit are all now slated for standard residential subdivisions. 

You’d think Peterborough was a boom-town. But where’s the gold? What’s the rush?

Peterborough made headlines earlier this year with an unemployment rate of nearly 10%, the highest of any of Canada’s urban areas. On top of this, many residents are forced to commute to Toronto or Oshawa to find work. Student enrolment at Trent is static. Peterborough’s median age of 43 means that most of the population is past child-bearing age. Retirees relocating here constitute a big chunk of our annual population growth.

Peterborough’s actual growth rate continues to hover just under 1% per year, well below the provincial average. This is right in line with historical growth patterns. In fact, Peterborough has had the steadiest growth rate of any city in Ontario. We’ve never succumbed to the boom-and-bust cycle that has toyed with places like Sault Ste. Marie, nor been swamped by waves of immigrants looking for cheap housing like Barrie and Burlington. Our slow-but-steady growth has been a blessing, keeping our city manageable and helping retain that friendly, small-town feeling. 

The recent study commissioned by city council on new arena facilities for Peterborough acknowledged this reality when making its projections. The study that recommended the Parkway and a bridge across Jackson Park for our transportation future did not. Nor did previous studies, which projected that Peterborough would have a population of 100,000 by now. In fact, we’re still under 80,000. Those old studies also called for two new bridges across the Otonabee to handle all the traffic we’d surely have by now. You’d think that hard-hat, number-crunching engineers would be immune to such wishful thinking. In fact, their image of the future tends to be no more realistic than that of your average teenager. 

There’s no economic basis for Peterborough’s growth rate to change any time soon. The gold rush on residential subdivisions is just a case of developers staking their long-term claims on a limited supply. It will be more than 20 years before those subdivisions are filled up. By the year 2040, many of us will be dead and gone, cars will be running on roads covered by solar cells, humanity will be technologized in ways we can barely imagine, and we’ll be in full-scale damage-control mode regarding our climate and ecology.

Peterborough’s own Inconvenient Truth is that the Parkway and the Jackson Park bridge are irrelevant to our transportation future. In spite of its attempts to tailor the facts to justify the Parkway, the study by AECON admits in its cost-benefit analysis that there is no economic case to build it. That’s right – AECON showed that benefits of the Parkway will not exceed the costs, even if you ignore the value of the lost habitat and recreational space and pretend there won’t be any cost overruns or long-term maintenance costs or lost opportunity costs in other areas.

The half-baked Environmental Assessment done by AECON has been appealed to Queen’s Park by a large number of citizens and groups, and is currently under review. The Lily Lake subdivision plan has also been appealed on the basis of its lack of common sense planning, a case that may go forth to the Ontario Municipal Board.

In the meantime, our outgoing council’s obsession with the Parkway has blinded them to the advanced and affordable technology of intelligent traffic control systems, the poor state of our current roads, and the obvious benefits of a Complete Streets policy, as recently presented to them by public health expert Larry Stinson.

They pretend that the Parkway is the answer to anticipated traffic congestion. The sad reality is that it’s holding up improvements that should be made today, while pandering to real estate interests who need it to make their north-end investments viable in a slow-growth, competitive economy -- on the public’s tab. 

  

Monsef Sparks Interest in Mayoral Campaign

Just days after Daryl Bennett formalized his intention to seek a second term in the mayor’s office, a surprising new candidate stepped forward to challenge him – Maryam Monsef, known around town as co-founder of the Red Pashmina campaign, a local initiative raising funds for women in Afghanistan.

Monsef herself was born in Afghanistan, and as a girl escaped the country with her mother and two sisters during the rise of Islamic militant fundamentalist group known as the Taliban in the mid-1990s following the end of Soviet occupation, as reported by the Examiner.

Monsef’s announcement immediately drew more attention and provoked more excitement than Bennett’s. Of course, young women with a hint of the exotic will attract more interest than balding old businessmen any day of the week – particularly in Peterborough, which continues to hold top-five placings in Canada not only in our unemployment rate, but also in our median age (43) and lack of ethnic diversity, as confirmed by our Wikipedia  page.

Monsef arrives on the campaign scene as Bennett’s antithesis - a welcome relief to voters who suffered through the 2010 election campaign hard-pressed to distinguish between the only two candidates, Bennett and incumbent mayor Paul Ayotte. Anyone seen tossing a coin on their way into the polling station could be forgiven.

The 2014 campaign will have some colour, thanks to Monsef, and not just because of her stylish purple lawn signs. Anyone looking for background on Monsef will run into the Red Pashmina campaign, which Monsef started along with Jessica Melnik (daughter of Peterborough’s best-known radio voice Mike Melnik) while both were studying at Trent University. Profits from the sale of the cashmere shawls known as pashminas are sent to a group called Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan  whose aim is help Afghan women and their families through education, a cause that has resonated with Peterborough’s career women and lends Monsef a feminist edge that sharply contrasts with Bennett’s old-school boys' club reputation.

Monsef's candidacy may help lure more young voters to the polls. She'll have just turned thirty when the new council takes office on December 1^st. Bennett is sixty-six. Monsef’s website says she believes that effective leadership is based on “collaboration and creativity” - concepts seldom heard in the same breath as Daryl Bennett’s name. Monsef’s father was killed in the civil unrest which drove her mother to seek refuge for herself and her three daughters in Canada. Bennett, by contrast, was given jobs by his father and his father-in-law Keith Brown, both local businessmen. Brown was Peterborough’s MPP through most of the 1960s, and formed Liftlock Coach lines in 1974, which eventually mutated into Bennett’s own Liftlock Group of Companies. Read the Examiner’s 2010 interview with Bennett to refresh your memory on his background.

What do these two polar opposite contenders for the mayor’s seat have in common? They both graduated from PCVS, located right across the road from city hall. The PCVS building is about to be approved for heritage designation by city council, which will at least prevent it from being turned into a parking lot if the school board tries to sell the property.

This past week, Monsef announced that her mayoral campaign had already raised $10,000 – one-fifth of the $50,000 spending limit she’s aiming to meet. Bennett, according to the Examiner, is planning to finance his entire campaign himself. His financial statement for 2010 states that Bennett kicked in $43,000 of his own cash to the last campaign, topped up by various realtors and developers, including Liberty Greens, a company run by Saverio Montemarano of Melody Homes.

How deep are Bennett’s pockets? This past January he pledged to spend up to a quarter of a million dollars to fight the Ontario Civilian Police Commission’s case regarding his conduct as a member of the police services board.

Unlike federal and provincial elections, there’s no limit to the amount of personal cash candidates can spend in the effort to get themselves elected to municipal office in Ontario.

Maybe Dean Del Mastro should have run for mayor, instead of MP. Del Mastro’s $21,000 personal cheque to a consulting firm put him in hot water with Elections Canada and got him ejected from the Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill. Final summations were made this week in court, and the judge says she’ll make her decision known on Hallowe’en, just days after the municipal election.

Should make for an interesting trick-or-treating season.

Bennett's Crew Declare Candidacies, Developers do Happy Dance; Hendry Finally In for Town Ward

Labour Day weekend brought long-anticipated hot summer weather to Peterborough. It also signaled the beginning of the active campaign period for the 2014 municipal election. Time to plant lawn signs!

Just like the muggy weekend weather, mayor Daryl Bennett left Peterborough residents waiting all summer. Would the taxicab business owner ever get around to informing the public whether or not he intended to seek re-election? Given the attitude Bennett displayed toward openness and transparency during his first term, few were surprised by his summer secrecy.

The public weren’t the only ones waiting around. Bennett created a traffic jam as councillors Bill Juby, Len Vass, and Dan McWilliams, the mayor’s compadres on council, chose to wait until Bennett declared before they would declare their candidacies. Predictably, once Bennett finally got around to informing the public that he would indeed seek a second term, Juby, Vass and McWilliams all followed suit in the week leading up to Labour Day.

The Fab Four constituted two-thirds of the voting bloc that rammed many motions through council in the past term in 6-5 votes. Bennett’s other two key votes belonged to Andrew Beamer and Bob Hall, both representing Northcrest. Together, the six managed to advance the agenda of suburban sprawl and the interests of developers by pushing the Parkway and the outrageous Jackson Park bridge to facilitate big new subdivisions on the city’s outskirts.

Beamer didn’t wait around for Bennett, declaring his candidacy early on for a second term representing Northcrest, the area on the hook to host the Parkway and much of the aforementioned sprawl. Hall has not put his name forward amid rumours that he’ll seek the federal Liberal Party nomination for the next federal election, hoping to run against Dean Del Mastro, or whoever replaces him. Of course, local Liberal Party members may have other ideas as to who they want to carry their torch.

Hall has developed a reputation for over-booking himself and resorting to e-mail form letters when corresponding with Northcrest residents. He spent more money than any other candidate during the last election, maxing out his limit of $14,000, yet received only 2478 votes, just 138 more than third-place finisher Dave Haacke. Where did Hall get the money? Much of it came from the development industry, and much of that came from out of town, including Mocor Investments,  Mason Homes (both based in Concord, Ontario) and Brookfield Homes,  the Ontario arm of Brookfield Residential, one of the biggest developers in North America. You can read Hall’s 2010 campaign financial statement here.

Mocor Investments co-owner Saverio Montemarano also controls Melody Homes, and a company called Liberty Greens. Through Mocor and Liberty Greens, Montemarano contributed thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Bennett, Beamer, Vass, and McWilliams, which you can see at the link above.

Is it just coincidence that Melody Homes owns big tracts of land in the north end and is hoping to fill them with houses? Try reading the terrible experiences of people who bought from Melody Homes here and be glad you’re not one of them.

As reported by the Examiner, Montemarano was also behind Del Mastro’s ill-advised push for a convention center on Little Lake in 2008.

Doesn’t it seem like out-of-town millionaires have more say over Peterborough’s growth agenda than the people who live here?

Of course, with an out-of-town millionaire like Bennett as our mayor, what else would one expect?

One might also wonder why Ashburnham residents keep voting in Vass, another wealthy businessman residing out in the county. And why Town Ward voters keep electing Juby, who doesn’t live downtown.

Maybe, being typical Canadians, we just don’t mind letting rich men from far away make decisions for us.

Or do we?

Running against these stale incumbents are a host of candidates who are actually interested in representing views other than the ones Bennett wants them to. Several of their websites are on the sidebar. There’s also a link to the City Hall webpage where you can see who’s running where so far.

Just this morning, former Examiner editor Jim Hendry became the latest candidate. Hendry will challenge Juby in Town Ward, as reported by the Examiner today.