This is a regular CATCH summary of votes at committee and council meetings. This report covers the month of June 2010. The first line of each entry identifies the issue, followed by a brief description. This is followed by the location of the vote in the third line. Multiple votes on the same issue are reported together. Absentees are only listed where reported in the minutes and where the missing councillors are members of that committee or decision-making body. Links are provided to source documents.  Note that the vast majority of council decisions are unanimous and the votes are not officially recorded.

Prior to construction of the Red Hill Valley Parkway, city officials rejected or ignored numerous warnings about climate change and potential flooding of the road project. The now acknowledged problems appear likely to worsen. This spring has smashed global temperature records and scientists have predicted that 2010 will be the hottest year ever.

A close vote at city council will mean further cuts this year in assistance to low-income mothers and their children. Councillors narrowly overturned a committee decision that had asked staff to search for ways to make up for a provincial freeze on the acclaimed Healthy Babies, Healthy Children program that has lost ten percent of its city staff since 2008.

With the Red Hill Parkway closed by flooding today for the fourth time in less than a year, city officials are grappling with the state of the city’s infrastructure in the face of global climate change. However, it appears a major city initiative to pay for stormwater costs by taxing parking lots and other impermeable surfaces may have been abandoned.

There’s surprise that more than two-thirds of the aerotropolis lands are earmarked for low-wage trucking and warehousing companies, along with concern about the impact on farmland and the city’s finances, as well as the implications of the cancellation of the mid-peninsula highway on the proposed airport employment growth district (AEGD). But the authors of a financial-economic impact analysis are defending their report.