Recently the Sackville Town website added the email addresses of the new councillors for the Tantramar region. Due to incorporating the LSDs into the Tantramar area, there is a small chance for political change because of the increased potential for differing points of view. So I encourage you to contact these councillors and voice your concerns and wishes for the community. You can cut and paste the email addresses into an email or better yet make a contact list for easier referral in your favourite email application.
If you’ve been busy and generally ignoring politics, it’s safe to say that this strategy isn’t working. By ignoring politics, people with vastly different ideologies are making significant changes that have more and more of an effect on your daily lives.
Some things that you could email the councillors about are (I’ll hopefully add more over time to this post):
-lowering property taxes (ie. the municipal mil rate) which will help with the affordable housing issue (significant part of the cost of home ownership). For example homes in the $390K price range will cost you $6000 per year in property taxes in the Sackville area or $500 per month.
-cutting spending which will be required to support the lowering of property taxes. This could include the reduction of Town staff and a variety of non-essential spending.
-reducing crime and drug use (often the driving force of crime) by increasing the policing presence and not letting repeat offenders out on the streets over and over again. Get drug users into treatment facilities with strong dissuasion techniques, as I wrote out in my previous article.
-improving health care access by encouraging walk-in clinics and more private health care. Not everyone needs to go to the hospital but they can’t get quick access to a doctor in the evenings or on weekends. While tele-health is a welcome addition, not everything can be addressed via this online method. A recent poll shows most Canadians favour adding private health care options (although article has many public health care biases).
-removing the climate change committee from its ties to the Town. For example recently a committee member was voted to be extended for another year by the council. This committee should be completely separate from the Tantramar government. The committee was started by a previous Mayor as a climate roundtable but at this point it should be a separate entity with its own funding. There is also a full time position funded partially by the Town. The committee can do whatever it wants, fund itself and make recommendations to the council just as any citizen is free to do.
-implementing a road use agreement for businesses located outside of Tantramar that are using heavy trucks on our roads. These roads get damaged quite a bit and often go without being repaired for years. But when they are eventually repaired or patched they are funded by the taxpayers.
-improving the notification process to the community when changes are being implemented such as rezoning, building approvals, etc. For example, many residents were unaware of the AIL plastics plant going in on Walker Road until they saw the 12 acres of trees being clear cut.
-improving transparency. Jamie Burke apparently had quite a stranglehold on communications (routing everything through him before councillors or the public could see the reports). Most of the existing councillors at the time and Mayor Shawn Mesheau were seemingly fine with all this as they didn’t push back on any of this and make any changes to improve this that I’m aware of.