City Services

Public works built around what residents need

(“Not one pothole left open”)

• Raise budgets for roads, sidewalks, active travel, accessibility and upkeep
• Replant the public gardens that earn us the name ‘a city of gardens’
• Encourage more food growing inside the city
• Keep services quick to answer and shaped by what residents ask for
• Deliver public works on a predictable, openly published schedule
• Commission a service master-plan update for the city fire service

The quality, reach and usefulness of public services and infrastructure is what everyday city life actually rests on. The last couple of years have worn the place down. Money moved to the pandemic response, and our streets and public spaces show it. It is time to put more care and maintenance back into public infrastructure. Roads need more paving – and potholes need filling! Sidewalks need smoothing and levelling, and the hedges beside them need cutting back. Active travel has been well served by new cycling infrastructure, but there is work left in building accessible routes for mobility scooters and wheelchairs, and space for other wheels – skateboards, scooters and hoverboards.

Public works crews keep the district running and make daily life better – clean streets, collected waste, an underground system that works. More resources need to go into those services so the city runs efficiently and dependably. Doing the work on schedule, and telling people what that schedule is, makes it far easier for residents to rely on the service and to accept the interruptions when they come.

When something breaks, the repair has to come quickly. Residents need response times they can predict and an easy way to see how a repair is progressing. We can extend our web capacity to give real-time updates on repair and maintenance work, so people can plan their journeys and their day around it.

This is a city of gardens, and a little more time and money would make it green again. Climate adaptation, and a growing respect for native plantings and the resilience they show through hot and cold extremes, have rightly moved us away from exotic species. Even so, plenty of options remain for diverse, colourful, beautiful planting. The city’s urban gardening programmes and policies can be strengthened too, widening the range of plants so the gardens are useful for growing food as well as good to look at.

The city fire service has covered this district for more than 150 years. Its current headquarters, Station No. 1, is being replaced by a new headquarters with an emergency response centre and mixed housing attached, including 130 affordable units run by a non-profit housing provider. Commercial and retail space and a public plaza are planned at the new site as well. As the service moves into that building, it is a good moment to ask what it needs in order to deliver the best possible service.