My own experience as a kid: Bullying

I had big ears and I was skinny, an instant target. Many times my ears hurt from being flicked with pencils, my jacket drenched in spit, my mom had to hose it down. My dad told me to tune them out, and not to react. Well, I tried my best but one day I had had enough. A kid flicked my ear from behind, I instantly swung around and landed a solid left hook that dropped him like a stone, he had a shiner too. That was the last time I was bullied at school. I fought back and won, my parents paid for plastic surgery to have my ears pinned back, and long hair came in style.

Mark-Alan Whittle, Hamilton Mountain

LETTER: Save money, let Skelly's able assistants run ward for rest of term

Re: The disenfranchisement of Hamilton's Ward 7 (Editorial, July 5)

After reading this editorial about the disenfranchisement of Ward 7, I had to chuckle a little as I have lived in the ward for decades and seen many councillors come and go.
Donna Skelly represented the ward well and managed to spend infrastructure money wisely, repaving and repairing roads, sidewalks and sewer relining, assets that other wards ignore — such as spending their infrastructure cash on other expenditures, like $220,000 given to a private sector theatre.
During the summer, local politics grinds to a halt. Most councillors are in holiday mode until the fall election cycle.
Perhaps the Ward 7 executive assistants that worked in Skelly's office can continue fielding constituents calls and directing them to the right department or person until the fall election, saving the city $50,000.
Mark-Alan Whittle, Hamilton Mountain

Democracy not served by secret committee votes

re: New school closure committee to hold secret-ballot votes (May 30)

Since my son Logan passed away, I haven’t paid much attention to the shenanigans of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board or its Trustees, despite having to pay for public schools costs, through my property taxes, of almost $1,000 per year.

At least I get to hear the local children laughing and playing during recess, as I live near four schools and near where the HWDSB is building its new ivory tower head office and massive parking lot.

All I ask in return is openness and accountability, where decisions are made in public, not behind a secret ballot.

This is not the same as secret ballot voting during federal, provincial and municipal elections.

I’m surprised some trustees can’t see the difference.

Allowing ARCs to vote in secret will allow members to say one thing in public, then do something else by secret ballot.

The decisions that have to be made are mathematical in nature, we have too few students with too many building to accommodate them with full programming.

I don’t have much faith in the ARC process as I get the feeling the decisions have already been made and the ARC meetings are window dressing.

Allowing secret balloting will only make the process less transparent and accountable to the public.

Mark-Alan Whittle
Hamilton Mountain

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Lobby registry will show special interest influence

re: City lobbyist registry

Way back in 2004, I was hired by a client to lobby Hamilton councillors respecting a business proposition. My client wanted to open a driving range for golfers on his property not far from Flamboro Downs. Before I got started I wanted to ensure transparency, so I consulted the provincial and federal lobbyist registry to inquire whether I should sign up as a lobbyist with their registries as Hamilton did not have one at the time. I was advised that I should approach city hall and try to get a lobbyist registry started.
Soon after, a voluntary registry was born, and I was the first recorded lobbyist. Fast forward to today, there are three of us on the list.
The registry should be mandatory. The city’s integrity commissioner could easily take over the management of the registry, if council wanted him to.
Once it is mandatory for lobbyists to register with the city, there will be a few red faces on council, as there are many lobbyists currently working under the radar. One can only hope that Lloyd Ferguson, the chair of the sub-committee in charge of rolling out the mandatory registry, gets his act together, starting with the definition of a lobbyist. A lobbyist is a person who tries to influence legislation on behalf of a special interest or a member of a lobby. I’m just hoping to live long enough to see the registry I helped create become mandatory, instead of the voluntary one that is not very effective at capturing lobbyists.

Mark-Alan Whittle
Hamilton Mountain

LETTER: Poverty industry perpetuates problem

re: Too many children still growing up in poverty (Community Columnist, Aug. 23)
In Tom Cooper’s column respecting poverty, he claims 29,000 Hamilton children are living in poverty and don’t get enough to eat.
After doing some research, I found out this claim is an extrapolation from statistics at least three years old.
Fast forward to today, Ontario Works caseloads for July 2012 were 13,337 individuals and families, down 241 cases (1.8 per cent) versus June 2012, but down 829 cases (5.6 per cent) versus July 2011.
As anyone can see, poverty has been reduced by almost six per cent in the last year.
Obviously people are getting jobs which allow them to live, work and play, to eat healthier food, to live a frugal life or reach for the stars.
The real problem in Hamilton is the poverty industry — groups that get thousands of dollars in funding to talk about the problem, even it doesn’t exist to the extent they claim, or as harsh and deep.
For a group that relies on the existence of poverty, it’s not hard to see the self-perpetuation in this and the reason why a $100,000 grant was not given to Tom’s outfit this year.
Only a full-time job can really lift someone out of poverty, in a real and effective way.
A hand up, not a hand-out.

Mark-Alan Whittle
Hamilton Mountain

De Caire cares

Re “Summer of the gun: Part 2” (Front Page, July 29): After reading about the huge number of deaths and injuries of innocent Toronto citizens at the hands of armed thugs, I feel safe and secure here in Hamilton, where only two people were shot and killed last year. In 2010 we had 12 homicides, in 2011 we had five, but so far this year we have had only four homicides, two by firearm — for a population of 520,000 people. Both gun-wielding suspects have been arrested and jailed. Our Police Chief Glenn De Caire, a former staff superintendant of the Toronto Police Service, has taken the lessons learned in Toronto and applied them here. We have seen remarkable change — fewer thefts, assaults and petty crimes, I only wish we had less drunks on the road. But Hamilton citizens are watching, calling 911 and turning in the drunks. This is community policing at its best, thanks to the leadership of Chief Glenn De Caire. Toronto’s loss is our gain.
Mark-Alan Whittle

Hamilton

(It would seem so)

HWDSB has jumped the shark

After reading about the plight of Grade 12 Hill Park student Brett Bailey, I’m convinced the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, and their politically correct staff, have finally jumped the shark, like Fonzi did on that old television show.
More galling is the fact that Brett, by all accounts a hard working young man, has been employed at his father’s restaurant, Hillbilly Heaven, for quite some time already, and he has a right to get credit for co-op work placement as is required by the school board in order for Brett to graduate from high school.
The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board should give their heads a shake and reverse their politically correct decision against this work placement and get back to doing something for the students they are mandated to serve, instead of playing political games — using hard-working students like Brett Bailey — as their political pawns, in their make-believe war on racism.
Mark-Alan Whittle
Hamilton Mountain

HWDSB has jumped the shark

City spending is on unsustainable path

re: State of the city address

Hamilton city council has a spending problem, no doubt about it. More telling is the amount of accumulated debt, which is $355 million for 2011, and will be $745 million for 2012 and will reach $1,042 billion by 2020.

This is unsustainable, given our shrinking property tax base. This year, over 14,000 Hamiltonians are collecting social service payments and another 14,000 are collecting ODSP. This too, is unsustainable.

On top of all this, council is still in the entertainment business, that cost property tax payers millions to bail out this year, due to mistakes made by the brain trust charged with running the three entities that make up HECFI.

Obviously this is not sustainable, no matter how much tax money is poured down a black hole. Even the city council live feed hardly ever works properly, despite the vast improvements in technology we have grown used to over the last 10 years.

Having lived in Hamilton most of my adult life, I can honestly say I’m not impressed with this council, compared to all the other I have observed over the years. Hopefully other fed up taxpayers have long memories and will say so at the ballot box in 2014.

Mark-Alan Whittle
Hamilton Mountain

Put money back: City’s in cash crisis

We’re a no-go for Games velo; Council’s spending cap not enough (Oct. 12)

Now that Hamilton city council has not been awarded the velodrome project for the 2015 Pan Am Games, I can only hope the $5 million set aside for the project will be returned to the Future Fund from whence it came.

Ditto for any cash as a result of selling toxic west harbour lands on the open market, as $10 million was expended buying out homeowners, thereby forcing them to move. In hindsight, this was a big mistake, given the facts of today.

Meanwhile our deficit going into 2012 is $35 million and the accumulated debt will double to $600 million by the end of the year. Hamilton has an elephant in the room nobody on council will admit exists. We have a spending problem.

Mark-Alan Whittle, Hamilton

As flood anniversary nears, much work still needed

As recent as June, many basements in a Hamilton neighbourhood were flooded, some for the first time, with sewage ejected into their basements when it rained.

Two years ago I opined that rampant development may have contributed to the problem because the trunk sewer line, which this development was hooked into, may have been too small in diameter as runoff from this area overwhelmed the combined storm water/sewer system.

Since I'm a retired mechanic and not a plumber, I decided to contact city hall to get some answers. I posed the following question to a number of officials who are responsibility for, and educated in, this area: “What I would like to know is, what have we done about the root cause, a combined sewer system that can’t deal with run-off, thereby flooding basements with raw sewage?”

Here is the answer I got. Hopefully it will come true for the citizens affected.

“Currently, we have completed the design for improvements to the city's Real Time Control (RTC) Operating Strategy, utilizing flow control gates to strategically direct flow in a dynamic environment while the rain is occurring. As the RTC improvements are implemented, more runoff will be captured for treatment.”

What this means is that the city will try computer modelling to simulate a flood, and measure various ways to prevent this from happening, before any actual work begins.

“An analysis of the Lower East End Drainage System recommended a series of capital improvements to increase the level of stormwater service in problematic areas. Included in the study recommendations were Storm Relief Sewers (twinning the capacity of the existing combined sewer) as well as increasing the size of sewers in other parts of the catchment.”

In plain English, new, larger sewer system pipes need to be put into the ground.

As far as the recent flooding goes, there’s a gravity problem that will need extensive work.

Here's how the city proposes to address it. Once again, capital expenditures will be needed very soon, before next spring.

“We are currently meetings with the residents affected by the most recent rain on June 7th and 8th. Our engineering consultants have completed a series of solutions; which will be presented to a public information center.”

“We are looking ways to move runoff out of the 'sag' areas by conveying it to a safe, c o n t r o l l e d Stormwater Facility (storage). The specifics of each alternative will be shared with the public and are subject to refinement and completion of the Class Environmental Assessment. Ongoing maintenance will keep the existing system operating at its designed standard.”

Keeping my fingers crossed for the residents who have suffered and will continue to suffer until the sewer pipes are replaced in their areas.

By MARK-ALAN WHITTLE, COMMUNITY COLUMNIST

Mark-Alan Whittle is a city hall watcher and Mountain resident. July 26 marks the second anniversary of a rain storm which caused extensive flooding on the east Mountain, the Red Hill Valley Parkway and other sections of Hamilton.