Mayoral candidates in Sault Ste. Marie debate roads, potholes and snow removal

We've heard from many voters about the condition of roads in Sault Ste. Marie, potholes. What's your plan to improve roads? The problem has not developed over the last four years, and it won't be solved in the next four years. The vast majority of roads in this community that are in the worst shape were last resurfaced before I was born. So what we did when I came into office in 2022 is we were spending $23 million per year on roads. we have increased that to $28 million per year on roads. So we have increased the roads budget, and we have done so even in a time when the city's tax increase last year was at 0%. Matthew Schiemreicher likes to use the number of $28 million, but he's not taking into account that what we're talking about is potholes, which is road resurfacing. So that budget has been reduced by $700,000 compared to last year. And an engineering report stated that they needed an extra $500,000 per year to beef up that budget. But that was not something that was granted by our city council. Joel Roswell, if you were to spend more on roads, where would you take money from? Well, I think there's a lot of places. Crazy downtown plazas, urban beaches, useless spending on consultants. I mean, the list goes on. we need to take a picture of what's going on in this city i even brought the budget okay i'm not sure if you want all the residents want to go through this because it's probably not going to be understood but there are areas where we need to adjust refocus and listen to the people of what they want not what we don't so as for what we can do here uh i do have a question actually that i'd like to ask public works why are we using graders that surely can't be good for the roads themselves That's a lot more down pressure as opposed to just a regular plow truck where you just have the weight of the blade doing the work. And so that is going to scrape the road a lot more. That's actually in part why we don't have lines by spring. So some of the question I have is the equipment, but also the snow banks are huge. And I really think once the storms let up, we have time to remove those. We have ensured that we are not taking away from policing. We are not taking away from homelessness. We are not taking away from roads. And so every other department needs to be looked at. In the time I've been on council, I have proposed $5.6 million in savings, and that has come from areas like the maintenance that the city does on catwalks in the neighborhood. The number of sidewalks that are plowed needs to be looked at every year so that we aren't plowing sidewalks unnecessarily. I think we need to look at how we're doing snow removal, not how we have been doing it why are we using the same equipment that's been around before i was born why are we having all these issues that end at ends of driveways by now and not following the bylaws that state it should be removed for the seniors after so many feet those are the types of things we need to look at why do why do we have to have such big equipment i see those snow removal signs about almost every single driveway across the community why is that that's because we're not doing something right to support you the snow removal is actually a lot better than people think coming from kitchener they weren't i would say as good and one thing that they made us do as residents is we had to clear a sidewalk so that's some that's a big savings for the city that you don't have to do that work that we had to do in kitchener um the main thing i don't like about the snow removal is bank height so that's something that i would look at the banks become really high to cut them down at a certain time to make sure it's visibility is good for people