"It becomes a separate tax... that can be raised..."

Thanks, Councillor Rick Chiarelli.

So our fine not-so-feathered friends at Ottawa City Hall are looking at raising property taxes by about 6% this year. I shouldn't single out Rick, as he was likely one of the few (aside from Alex Cullen, but maybe he's out of town) who would stick his neck out to get chopped off in front of local TV cameras... but I just did.

They want to "introduce" yet another annual user fee for recycling we've been paying for for years ($41) and another for the organic recycling ($68). Are any of us stupid enough to believe that tax bills will be lowered by $41 when this "new" user fee is added to the so-called utility bill? Yeah, and pigs fly.

I wrote in the past about this ridiculous shell game scam these politicians have been putting on at our expense, year after year after year. So the goal is 6% this year. Does this mean that net disbursements from residential taxpayers will be 6% higher than last year? Are you nuts? Of course not! They never are. Those "invisible" user fees keep getting jacked up, but we don't see that at budget time. When Council rises and toasts itself for another job "well done", settling for yet another tax hike, they quietly look the other way while the price of doing everything at the city goes up by 5, 10, 15, 20 or 50%... sometimes more.

After spending twelve years working for an autonomous organization operating in a city-owned building, watching as the price of everything went up while quality of service (anyone who has watched the quality of work contracted cleaning companies, for example, go down the tubes because of one reason or another - accountability to the signed contract be damned for one...) got worse and worse... I couldn't take it anymore. The problem? Neither elected officials, nor bureaucrats whose job it was to monitor the contractors ever seemed to care.

The bottom line seems to be, thanks to bad tax policy almost 20 years ago now, we keep paying more and keep getting less. If this organic recycling project is so expensive, turf the damn thing until we can afford to implement it. When times are tough, you don't set out to find new things to spend money on. I want to opt out of this latest fad, but a green box was dropped off last week. I have put it in the back - it won't see the light of day again. I still believe in the city's last attempt at dealing with yard waste - anyone remember the big brown compost bins the city gave out years and years ago?

City Council seems to spend more and more year after year... raising our taxes year after year... and we keep putting up with it, re-electing the same people election after election. We tried electing a new mayor last time around - but without electing new councillors, one person cannot turn things around on his own.

Will we ever learn? I don't think so.