PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor in response to news last week that the Region is facing increased infrastructure expenses:
The ‘infrastructure deficit’ has been ‘the can kicked down the road’ for decades now. If any Regional elected politician, within the past 50 years, or even the Region’s new commissioner of public works, can seriously pretend that this is a new issue, and nothing to do with them, then it is the Region’s residents, property owners and taxpayers who deserve to feel ‘terrified’ with the potential tax increases both politicians and our bureaucrats intend to levy on us for all their past failures.
There is a senior member of the current federal government, once a former Mayor of Port Colborne, who once stated that the ‘infrastructure deficit’ was not ‘sexy’! He was not the first, and as this story tells us, remains the excuse our current ‘leaders’ both elected and unelected continue to peddle.
Far too many other ‘sexy’ political vote-catching issues to peddle, most doomed to economic failure, recommended by bureaucrats and approved by politicians only interested in re-election and bureaucrats in their own financial futures.
For decades Niagara Region has been responsible for submitting annual reports to the provincial government on natural flooding events where untreated sewage contaminates flood water drainage. Funny that! No local news media ever prints those? And why can anyone believe that the many beach closures around Niagara Region beaches are only ‘natural’ events?
For Regional taxpayers this report is far more than ‘terrifying’ and made even more so by the matter-of-fact report suggesting that the tax increases to rectify these decades of political neglect are not really any big deal.
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet
