You already saw my post about the Big Belly, here’s another innovative concept: turbine powered street lights. And dang, they look good too!

Municipalities need to figure out how to reduce the operating cost of street lights.  1% of Milton’s property taxes go towards it. 

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?

For those interested, you can find new transit routes here (effective September 8th).

Good news: Express bus service on Scott Expressway Blvd should start on March 8th (all-day will follow in September). 

The route should be Main Street –> Scott Blvd (going South) –> Dymott (going West) –> Savoline (going North) –> McDougall (going East) –> back up on Scott (North) and then Main. 

I am one step closer to selling my second car.

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!

Here are some charities taking online and / or phone donations. I have not investigated efficiency of all these charities yet (as a policy, I do not donate to charities unless at least 70% of my donations reach the victims. Some charities have huge "administrative costs" where most of your contributions end up in forms of salaries and advertisement. Sad but true).

I am personally going with Doctors Without Borders. 

The Canadian Red Cross 1-800-418-1111
Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) 1-800-982-7903.
Unicef Canada 1-800-567-4483.
World Vision Canada.
The Humanitarian Coalition.
The Mennonite Central Committee 1-888-622-6337.
Save the Children.
Plan Canada 1-800-387-1418.
The Salvation Army in Canada 1-800-725-2769.

Another offbeat post.  If you can spare some money for Haitians, Ottawa will match your donations dollar-for-dollar.  Another reason to give. 

More than 100,000 people may have died in the Haiti Earthquake. I am not pushing any specific charity, but please consider donating some money to people in Haiti.  They are in desperate need of our help. 

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.]

If elected, I promise to be accessible, transparent and representative.

1. Accessible:  Today you can contact me via this website, e-mail, facebook page, twitter or cellphone.  That will not change.
2. Transparent: I will continue to be fully transparent. I am not always right and you will not always agree with me. However, you will always know where I stand.  In fact, I am even publishing all campaign donations online.
3. Representative: I work for us.  I will represent you and only you.  I am not here to serve developers, builders or any other special interest groups.

I will consider the opportunity to be your spokesperson in the council an honour.  For further details, please see my campaign page.

Regular readers of my blog may not be surprised to learn that I have decided to enter the race for the Local council for Ward 8.

I am not going to make vague and ambiguous promises. I am not promising to change the world, bring about world peace, end world hunger or to teach every bad driver how to drive. However, I do unconditionally promise to be accessible, transparent and representative (full commitment).

A councillor is supposed to listen to his or her constituents and represent their interests in the Council. Those who know me know that I can do that very well.

I want to improve the quality of our lives, and those of our children. You can get highlights on my campaign page (or drill in deeper to get a whole lot of details).

If you support me then perhaps you’ll consider fanning me on facebook to show support. You may also consider making a little campaign donation.  Every bit helps.

[ps: I have disabled comments on this post. Please leave a comment on my campaign page instead.  Thanks so much]

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.