Council Puts Brakes On City-Wide Transit Levy

Rural residents can breath a big sigh of relief. Sarnia council has voted to maintain the status quo and not implement a city-wide transit levy. Councillor Mike Kelch moved the motion. "I was here when this decision was made before and the public input was pretty much the same as what I'm looking at now," says Kelch. "There are two things that I can see. One is that there is support for the status quo for conventional transit. Also, I'm very pleased to see that there was overwhelming support for Care-A-Van being subsidized across the tax base. I thank members of the public. We had over 400 responses. I can't ignore that and I just believe that this is the path that we should take." Councillors Cindy Scholten and Andy Bruziewicz voted against the motion. "I'm definitely a firm believer that we all should be paying for this type of service," says Scholten. "To me, it's not a matter of how close you live to a bus stop, because I live close to a bus stop and I don't use the bus anymore and probably haven't for well over 20 years." 400 people participated in a survey on the issue, 63% were in favour of keeping the conventional transit levy the same and 81% supported the current method of collecting property tax for Care-A-Van specialized transit.