🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Ana Bailão’s Plan to Revitalize Sports Fields for Kids and Families

🔗 LINK: anabailao.ca/latest-new…

🔧 DOABLE? Yes.

💰 COSTED? Frustratingly, no.

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️½ (1.5 out of five)

At this point, I think it’s fair to say there are four basic categories of campaign promises:

1) Bad idea with no funding strategy

2) Bad idea with funding strategy

3) Good idea with no funding strategy

4) Good idea with funding strategy

Too many campaign promises during this mayoral by-election have found themselves in that third category.

Take this one, from former councillor Ana Bailão. She wants to “improve playing surfaces, upgrade lighting systems, and enhance infrastructure to create safe, state-of-the-art sports facilities” and also “install accessible pathways, seating areas and washrooms.”

These are good ideas! But Bailão, who has promised to keep property taxes at or below the rate of inflation, has offered no strategy on how to pay for the capital work to make these upgrades or the ongoing operational effort needed to keep them available to people.

She does promise to “establish a Sports Field Task Force made up of community members, sports enthusiasts and local experts to provide recommendations, ensuring that the revitalization efforts reflect the needs of the people who use these spaces” but I feel like this Task Force would spend most of their time asking for more municipal funding because as it stands Bailão has no plan to offer any of it.

Perhaps I am being unduly harsh, but Bailão served on council for 12 years. She knows that initiatives like this come with a significant cost. A recent city hall budget briefing note pegged the cost of designing and installing a single year-round park washroom building at between $400,000 and $525,000. That’s significant.

Upgrading the city’s sports fields and providing supporting infrastructure like washrooms is a fantastic policy, but, please, give us a plan to pay for it.

PLATFORM VIEW is a daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.