First, congratulations of working through the budget by such an early date and taking a holistic view of our needs within the city.
Last year council approved traffic calming in the Exhibition Park area. This was a very welcome and quite overdue decision that will make the area safer for pedestrians of all ilk: schoolchildren, workers, parents with infants and seniors, a condition not being presently met with blatant disregard of stop signs and speed limits.
I hope that the decision to calm these streets remains within next year’s budget, and that the calming can be in place early in the spring. BH
I am one of those certainly pleased that every effort is being made to keep taxes down as much as possible during this period of economic difficulties. I would like to thank you all for these efforts and ask that you forward this appreciation on to staff as well.
On-the-other-hand, I would ask you to also keep in mind the traffic calming recommendations that were made previously for the Exhibition Park area. The stop sign experiment is not working and pedestrians remain at risk on Kathleen and Exhibition due to the increase in ‘cut-through’ traffic. I would expect that some consideration of safety concerns should be given some priority over other possible items within the budget in a way that would not challenge too severely the overall attempts to keep the budget on target toward a minimal increase.
Thanking you for your attention to this issue. JM