Jabs fly during city budget battle

you are going hyperbolic once again deano.
50 THosuand People does not trranslate into 50000 houses.. And no government needs to force anyone to do anything. All they have to do is offer a better deal.

My Plan - no fairy dust required, just a good chunk of my tax dollars to make the City a better place to live.
But again, you are right, if the mindset of peggers is such as yours, i would agree, nothing will happen. You just keep on tinkering with details and no cash while other municpalities do the serious work of getting this done. Then you can copy it , tinkler with it, and claim it as your own.

NO WAY NO HOW....ugh how constipated.

HA HA HA... man you are funny.

.

How sad. Winnipeg deserves to have more intelligent, mature and forward thinking civic councilpeople than this bunch of drama queens.
If they spent as much time focusing on continually making Winnipeg a better place than squabbling, the city itself would be in a much better state.

You can see both sides tho.

On Pro side... its what was agreed to be done previously (for the most part) and not much else because we simply dont have the money right now.

on the con side.. They never got a decent chance to discuss it and offer tweaks so their opinion is basically tossed away.

Could there be discussions about alternative funding and such? Why sure... but those would have had to have happened almost a year ago and already be implemented and bringing in money. It is after all called a budget... not a fantasy.

JTF wrote:We could start with the school boards then gradually move on to these bedroom communities. We did it once before so we can do it again eh.

That would save huge amounts of money I bet.

Except the amalgamation of school boards resulted in increased administration costs, and borders were redrawn really, really poorly.

EdWin wrote:How sad. Winnipeg deserves to have more intelligent, mature and forward thinking civic councilpeople than this bunch of drama queens.
If they spent as much time focusing on continually making Winnipeg a better place than squabbling, the city itself would be in a much better state.

Unfortunately, instead of attracting the best and the brightest, for the most part the people we attract to municipal and provincial politics are often those that would see the position as a pay raise from their current employment.

St Norberter wrote:

JTF wrote:We could start with the school boards then gradually move on to these bedroom communities. We did it once before so we can do it again eh.

That would save huge amounts of money I bet.

Except the amalgamation of school boards resulted in increased administration costs, and borders were redrawn really, really poorly.

What amalgamation are you speaking of?

The last time they were amalgamated. umm..15? years ago?

I'm not talking one or two....I'm talking down to one or two.

There's no question that this would save an enormous amount of money.

I agree. one inside the city..and two outside the city.

Agree JTF. One school board would save a ton of money. How many superintendents and assistant supers do we really need for a mediocre system, not to mention all the other redundancies, including school division buildings and all they entail. What a colossal waste of money.

And to think, there is a large contingent of politicians and population who will support doing nothing of this sort to realize savings. And they wonder why we get jaded.

Caveat... one school board within city AND remove school boards power of Taxation

I wonder if part of the hesitancy on the province to do anything meaningful with school boards has to do with the fact that, by law, Manitoba is supposed to have a Protestant and a separate Catholic School system. Thats being covered at the moment by providing public funding to private Catholic schools to fill the gap. Would a wholesale review of the school divisions bring this up and create another unwanted issue for any political party?

Dems 2 caveats. Once you take care of the amalgamation costs would go down , so next step is to take that issue off their hands and drop kick it back to the province where that responsibility should be answered for. Talk about insulating oneself from their responsibilities.

Huh? School divisions are a provincial responsiblity, so if they try anything as drastic as consolidation into one division, my point is that it would draw the separate Catholic system into the issue.

Its very frustrating to see the games both sides ( the province and the school boards) play with funding.

A simple X dollars per student funding (with some leeway built in to recognize its more costly in non urban areas because of busing kids and other costs are more the further away you get from the city should basically be legislated.

Never mind all this funding that is raised through school run "begging parents for more money" programs.

I dont mind the schools making extra money through the school book sales and silver collections at concerts but this constant... chocolate, recipe book, coupon book sales crap is ridiculous. "richer" schools end up making exponentially more on these types of things and then "poorer" schools end up simply getting more from everyone else's taxes.

The last time they did amalgamations, there wasn't any significant cost savings ( remember, any cost savings is really going to come at the administrative level)

And they left some divisions intact that makes you wonder why.

yup. But last time they only strongly suggested it. They never forced amalgamation. I can truly see some school divisions being complete asses when it comes to forced amalgamation though.


Lets not even get into how it makes any sense at all to have elected trustees that basically "report" to superintendents rather then the other way around.

St Norberter wrote:The last time they did amalgamations, there wasn't any significant cost savings ( remember, any cost savings is really going to come at the administrative level)

And they left some divisions intact that makes you wonder why.

Are you talking about where they amalgamated two little divisions a couple of years ago? Where the employees went from the lowest paid to the highest in one swoop?

I thtink the amalgamation took place because of enrollement?

no..

this one

http://gradworks.umi.com/NR/41/NR41282.html

....ahhhh...the NDP implemented the amalgamations....enough said.

MOst of that was rural. Time to talk about the SD's in and around Winnipeg. (Seven Oaks has schools in West St Paul and River East covers East St Paul and has kids from St Clements)