Mayor miffed after critics blast road budget
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/12/2016 (2979 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman has lashed out at council opponent Russ Wyatt and Manitoba Heavy Construction Association president Chris Lorenc for their presentations about the city’s roads budget at a committee meeting last week.
In a harshly worded email sent Friday to councillors, Bowman describes Lorenc as a “lobbyist” acting on behalf of “special interests” and accuses Lorenc and Wyatt of “partnering” to take the city “backwards.”
“We cannot allow dysfunction and old school politics to return,” Bowman wrote in his email. “We cannot allow special interests to displace and misrepresent the direction of an elected council.
“Lobbyist Chris Lorenc and Coun. Wyatt are attempting to do just that, and by doing so are moving us backward.”
Bowman tried to defend his proposed road spending plan for 2017-2022. He incorrectly described it as an increase over the spending he proposed for that period in his first budget in 2015.
It’s a decrease, which Lorenc and Wyatt are opposed to, and a spending change Bowman refused to admit when challenged by the Free Press.
As part of his attack on Wyatt and Lorenc, the mayor attacked council’s 2013 spending commitment — even though Wyatt and Lorenc want Bowman to stick to the spending plan in the 2015 budget.
In that budget — Bowman’s first after being elected mayor — the long-term plan was to spend $782.9 million on regional and local street repairs from 2017 to 2022.
But in the proposed budget tabled Nov. 22, Bowman is planning to spend $97.7 million less, or $685.2 million during that six-year time frame.
Lorenc and Wyatt, along with Coun. Ross Eadie, appeared separately at last week’s committee meeting and pointed out the discrepancy in road spending. They demanded Bowman return to the 2015 plan.
Lorenc, a city councillor from 1983 to 1992, said council has the right to change spending plans, but it must admit it’s making the change and debate it.
“That, at minimum, is what I think the public should be entitled to expect,” Lorenc told the Free Press.
Lorenc said he is “disappointed” with Bowman’s email attack but would not comment further.
In his email, Bowman incorrectly stated the $685 million for street repair is an increase of $45 million over the six-year period outlined in the 2015 budget.
Bowman wrote that council’s spending on roads in 2016 and its planned spending in 2017 exceeds what the 2013 council — when Wyatt was finance chairman — had planned to spend over the same period.
Bowman also incorrectly accused Wyatt and Lorenc of wanting to increase frontage levies “by $1 per square foot every year, for 13 years.”
Someone on council must have leaked a copy of Bowman’s email to Lorenc because he responded to Bowman’s attack with his own email two hours later, stating it’s “inaccurate” and saying it misinterprets concerns he raised at a committee meeting last week when the budget was being reviewed.
“We appeared (at the committee meeting) and circulated our material to ask the mayor and council to be mindful of, and keep, political promises made to the public,” Lorenc wrote in his email to council members. “What we have represented is factual and consistent with the public record.”
Lorenc said Bowman’s reference to the frontage levy is inaccurate and he had made no recommendation they be increased.
Despite the similarities in the presentations and criticisms made at the committee meeting, Lorenc denied he had collaborated with Wyatt or Eadie, a statement he made to the committee at the time.
aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca