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WATERLOO CHRONICLE Publisher: Cal Bosveld B86â€"2830 . Fax: 886â€"9383 Eâ€"mail: wchronicle@sentex. net 75 King St. South, Suite 201 Waterloo, Ontario N2J 1P2 Regional Classified Classified The Waterloo Chronicle is published every Wednesday by The Fairway Group, a division of Southern Ontario Community Newspapers Inc., a division of Southam Publications, a CanWest Company The views of our columists are their own and do not necessarily represent those of the newspaper. Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement Number 136379 International Standard Serial Number ISSN 0832â€"3410 Carolyn Anstey Jim Alexander Circulation Director of Manager Advertising The Waterlao Chranicle welcomes leters to the Editor They should be signed with name, address and phone nirm ber and will be verified for accu racy. No unsigned letters will be published: Submissions may be edited for length. sa please be hnef Copyright in letters and ather materials submitted to the Publisher and accepted for publication remains with the author. but the publisher and its hcensees may freely reproduce them in print electromic at ather forms Our mailing address is 75 King St S . Sinte 201. Waterloo NJT 1P2. eour e mail address is wehramicle@sentex net. and our fax mumber is 886 9384 9( Letters Policy Andrea Bailey Reporter Gerry Mattice Retail Sales Manager Audited circulation: 26,056 Norma Cyca Lynn Bartal Manager C > sm © Deborah Crandall Editor Sylvia O‘Donnell Laure Ridgway Bob Vrhanac Sports Editor Sales t‘s been a long, hard winter in Canada. It‘s a great Iplace to live, but by the middle of March, enough is enough! Our family was lucky to be able to escape part of the winter and while sitting on a Florida beach recently, the gulf looking postcard perfect only a dozen yards away, my blood began to boil. It wasn‘t the Florida heat that was to blame; it was the politiâ€" cians and taxes that were raising my body temperâ€" ature. Sitting here in the southern sun, I recalled that during last November‘s elections all the candiâ€" dates at the meetings I attended spoke about keepâ€" ing taxes down. I also remembered a line that appeared in the Record a few days before we left: "freezing property taxes only forces councils to eventually hike taxes to cope with growth,"it said. Waterloo Mayor Lynne Woolstencroft was quoted as saying, "It catches up with you". When I returned home last week, there was a headline in the Chronicle: City council approves 4% tax hike," and I have to admit that I am disapâ€" pointed! Last year, Waterloo‘s tax base grew by another four per cent. If I read our mayor correctly râ€"_â€"T with her happy thoughts * of a tax increase of anothâ€" ‘ GUES F T‘ er four per cent, it means COLUMNIS Waterloo city council is ‘ spending at least eight per cent more. If you add the ; $600,000 from last year‘s im 1.2 million surplus, that |8§ *<MM en e makes an mc(:easc in w“,m council spending of 10 per ue cent â€" on what? Coun. L Taylor told us where 3.5 per cent of spending was going, what about the MIKE other 6.5 per cent? CONNOUTY THNSIC ANQ | FATDAGE . ocm have been transferred to the Region of Waterloo. No need for the city to tax growth in those areas. Expanding the fire departâ€" ment will be a capital cost, not an operating cost. Adding a couple of firefighters does increase the operating cost, but only about one percentage point. The truth of the matter is that the City of Waterloo has enough money to freeze taxes now. Planning consultant Bill Green was 100 per cent correct last year when he reminded local councils that growth expands the tax base, which generates new cash to pay for new services without the need to raise taxes over the cost of inflation. He was also right when he told the mayors that councils cannot keep blaming the provinces for downloading of services for tax hikes. Waterloo city council should be more prudent As past chair of the city‘s finance committee, 1 know that over the past five years the city‘s surplus (the difference between what comes in and goes out} has always been more than S$1 million, which is about 3.5 percent of the budget. The city has traâ€" ditionally put approximately $600,000 of this back into the base budget as it has this year. Where is this extra money going? I wish ! was back into the thick of things so I could find out, but that‘s life. I hope the taxpayers of Waterloo call for a detailed explanation of what extra services we are gotting for this fourâ€"perâ€"cent tax hike, which repreâ€" sents a 10â€"perâ€"cent increase in expenditures â€" the largest tax increase in 10 years! When I was in Florida, 1 could cool off with a cold beer and a swim in the ocean. Now that I am home, what would really help me cool off is news that the City of Waterloo is listening to people and increasing spending by no more than three to four per cent. The way our economy is going, there is a good reason for council to be prudent â€" considerâ€" ing council should have known the region was going to raise property taxes by nine per cent, due to altering the differentials between commercial, industrial, multi residential and single residential properties GUEST ‘COLUMNIS MIKE CONNOLLY VIEWPOINT Throne speech wins prize for vagueness en Waterloo region is totaling up Whe value of its cash crops, let‘s hope the calculators remember the marijuana output, And that‘ll only be the grass that‘s nabbed. It doesn‘t account for the weed that goes undetected. 1 hear tell the homes raided were given away by the smartâ€"aleck signs on the lawns: Keep on the Grass. & Details to Follow: Throne speeches are notoriously lacking in specifics, but, if there were a prize for vagueness, it would have to go to last week‘s Ontario throne speech. It had precious little to promise, but in almost every case it pledged that details would be unveiled on date soâ€"andâ€"so. All of which suggests that wads of documents will be hauled into the legislature come those fateful days. The speech was mighty pedestrian, puncâ€" tuated as usual by the vows to make public business public and good stuff like that. When it pledged sunset laws and zeroâ€"based budgeting, you have to wonder where the Tories have been the past halfâ€"dozen years. One particular sentence had a real mesâ€" sage for Waterloo Region â€" more particularâ€" ly, Cambridge. The sentence said that public funds should not be used to do any lobbying. Whoops! That calls into question Cambridge‘s hiring of a lobbyist & to romance the MPPS, particuâ€" Mege larly government ones, on ‘ ()1\([ Cambridge‘s alleged yen to | remain a standâ€"alone city ‘ IIG Mark you, no vote has been held on the issue, but Mayor Doug Craig is apparently conâ€" vinced that, aside from the lobâ€" byist, he alone speaks for his city. Since he‘s so vocal himself, you‘d think he‘d heed Queen‘s Park and dispense with the lobâ€" byist. Craig criticizes everything the region does. If he were one of Santa‘s elves, he‘d tell Santa to lose weight and shave. Soot Case: Recently a Clean Air Festival was held in Waterloo, and that‘s all to the good, but it leaves me with one question: Where is Kâ€"W air pollution coming from all of a sudden. And this at a time when the community has fewer belching chimneys than ever before. You don‘t have to be ancient to recall when Kâ€"W had more rubber factories, brewâ€" eries, meat processors, furniture factories and other assorted smokeâ€" and stenchâ€"makâ€" ing industries than now _And that‘s not to mention the one glueâ€" producing plant Compared to those days, the Kâ€"W air ((f walching 6 he P i think you‘re walching too much hockey .. looks pristine pure, but we‘re told that occaâ€" sionally we have the dirtiest atmosphere in Canada. How so? I know that a couple of metal plants have been mentioned for smog, but they seem unlikely to be big causes. 1 have not a whit of proof, but I‘m preâ€" pared to believe that Cambridge is to blame. It‘s based on the scientific principle that hot air rises, and I suspect that Cambridge counâ€" cil meetings are wafting a lot of stuff skyâ€" wards. Next stop: Kitchenerâ€"Waterioo! Incidentally, car exhaust contributes largeâ€" ly to smog. The carâ€"haters are urging one solution: Vent the exhaust inside the cars. Up and down: Now some U.S. econoâ€" mists are saying the big recession isn‘t, that the stock market will soon recover. Say, you can always tell an investor these days. He‘s someone who‘s alert, informed, attuned to the economic heartbeat of Canada! And he cries a lot, too! Road‘s Scholar: You don‘t get excited about police promising crackdowns on slopâ€" py motorists? Well, that makes you about average. That‘s because the alleged crackdowns are too frequent, too thinly applied and too brief. It seems that what the gendarmerie do is announce the crackdown, apply only ns f!nough officers to write a showâ€" ho ing of tickets, trumpet the JQUBARE | results, and then recall the offiâ€" TV ‘ cers involved until next time. :i They‘d rather go the back P ; way to London or Toronto rather l than join the truckers‘ jamboree that the Fourâ€"Ohâ€"One has â€" become. The car driver feels DY overmatched _ alongside the D monster 18â€"wheelers. By the way, I did one of my periodic â€" checks on â€" the Conestoga Expressway to see if the 80 klicks limit is being observed. Har! Har! In the check only one car was heeding the limit and that was my trusty Acura. The other cars made me feel l was standing still. This isn‘t a criticism, it‘s just an observaâ€" tion in the wake of a lot of huffing and puff ing when the limit was lowered after an acci dent. Incidentally, road rage is becoming so common they‘re thinking of installing speed bumps on the Fourâ€"Ohâ€"One. The bumps woan‘t be to slow the cars. They‘te to throw off your arm If such is the caseâ€"and even if it isn‘t â€" the system â€" isn‘t working. For example, things have got so bad on the Fourâ€"Ohâ€" One that many a motorist won‘t venture a mile on it anymore.