Mayor tries to sell budget
Posted Jan 20, 2011 11:28:13 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson attended a breakfast meeting with members of the Nepean Chamber of Commerce Thursday where he discussed the budget and took questions from taxpayers.
His proposed budget, which he presented Wednesday morning, has received good reviews from the majority of the public, but he did hint that a major restructuring of the transit system might be on the horizon.
Watson calls the public transit system the City of Ottawa’s “version of health care”: too expensive to sustain.
The budget is proposing a 2.5 per cent hike in bus fares, and route cuts. New drivers will also be hired to help fight the soaring costs of overtime pay.
“We’ve got to get transit right, we’ve got to make it affordable and make sure it’s sustainable,” Watson told reporters after his speech Thursday.
He says spending millions of dollars in overtime is not an efficient way to run the system.
“Lets get the base number of employees right so that we have a system that’s more reliable,” he says.
Watson says he hopes to get input from taxpayers on how we can save money in other areas as well.
