February 27, 2024, at 4:00 PM

Original link

The meeting is called to order at 4:01 PM; it being noted that Councillors P. Van Meerbergen, S. Lehman, and S. Hillier were in remote attendance.

1.   Disclosures of Pecuniary Interest

That it BE NOTED that no pecuniary interests were disclosed.

2.   Consent

2.1   2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget Reconciliation to the Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB) Financial Statement Budget

2024-02-27 Staff Report - 2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget Reconciliation

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by S. Lewis

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the following actions be taken:

a)    the “Public Sector Accounting Board Reconciliation” (Reconciliation) regarding expenses excluded from the Mayor’s proposed 2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget, as appended to the staff report dated February 27, 2024 as Schedule “A”, BE ADOPTED; it being noted that the Reconciliation was presented in the draft 2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget released at the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee on December 12, 2023; and

b)    the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to update the Reconciliation to reflect the consolidated budget figures once available.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

3.   Scheduled Items

3.1   Public Participation Meeting - Not to be heard before 4:00 PM - Budget

Moved by D. Ferreira

Seconded by C. Rahman

That the following written submissions for the 2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget 2024 2nd Public Participation Meeting BE RECEIVED for consideration by the Municipal Council as part of the Multi-Year approval process:

  • a communication from W. Kinghorn, President, ACO London Region Branch;

  • a communication from L. Tinsley;

  • a communication from P. Kemp;

  • a communication from G. Dendias;

  • a communication from R. Ross;

  • a communication from C. Beynon, Sr Artistic Director, Amabile Boys and Men’s Choirs, Professor Emerita, University of Western Ontario;

  • a communication from C. McIntosh;

  • a communication from S. Watters;

  • a communication from M. Saito;

  • a communication from C. Richards;

  • a communication from B. Couto;

  • a communication from J. Hannay;

  • a communication from K. Sepi;

  • a communication from L. McLean;

  • a communication from R. Todd;

  • a communication from B. Newell;

  • a communication from M. Caldwell;

  • a communication from A. Miller;

  • a communication from J. O’Connor;

  • a communication from M. Thiessen;

  • a communication from K. Cassidy;

  • a communication from J. Klar;

  • a communication from J. Beltrano;

  • a communication from J. and M. O’Connor;

  • a communication from D. Pollock, President, Navigating Retirement;

  • a communication from J. Notwell;

  • a communication from K. Kaisar;

  • a communication from K. Chartrand;

  • a communication from A. Ausrotas;

  • a communication from A. Moyer;

  • a communication from N. Roberts;

  • a communication from T. Potvin;

  • a communication from A. Weiss;

  • a communication from M. Peeff;

  • a communication from H. Parker;

  • a communication from C. Ramdharry;

  • a communication from K. Barua;

  • a communication from N. Brandon;

  • a communication from J. Rodger, T. Smuck, J. Dunn, E. Farooqi and E. Rose;

  • a communication from C. Murphy;

  • a communication from A. Thompson;

  • a communication from M. Brown;

  • a communication from E. Akanbi;

  • a communication from C. Montgomery;

  • a communication from K. Chapman;

  • a communication from B. Parkins;

  • a communication from K. Pagniello, Executive Director and Lawyer, Neighbourhood Legal Services;

  • a communication from L. Abidakun;

  • a communication from H. Coggins;

  • a communication from L. Bikos;

  • a communication from K. Albarkri;

  • a communication from B. Samuels;

  • a communication from L. White;

  • a communication from N. Fraser;

  • a communication from P. Linardic;

  • a communication from S. Lucas;

  • a communication from J. Sayles;

  • a communication from V. Van Linden;

  • a communication from the Grand Theatre, London Arts Council, London Public Library and Museum London;

  • a communication from J. Cordes, Past Chair, Middlesex London Food Policy Council;

  • a communication from P. Moore;

  • a communication from B. Amendola, Community and Social Service Volunteer;

  • a communication from L. Thorne;

  • a communication from H. Chapman;

  • a communication from D. Brown, W. Thomas, C. Watson, Coordinator, Midtown Community Organization;

  • a communication from N. Fraser;

  • a communication from S. M. Chitty;

  • a communication from W. Brock;

  • a communication from D. Ronson;

  • a communication from J. Seeler, Co-Chair, London Homeless Coalition;

  • a communication from D. Prout;

  • a communication from M. Cassidy, Interim CEO, Pillar Nonprofit Network;

  • a communication from A. Angelus and L. Sturaitis;

it being noted that at the public participation meeting associated with this matter, the following individuals made oral submissions regarding this matter:

  • J. Cameron;

  • S. Pastuck;

  • F. Swart;

  • A. Zylawi;

  • Mya;

  • P. Watson;

  • N. Fraser;

  • A. Rolo;

  • G. Manly;

  • S. Shakaram;

  • V. Lubrano;

  • R. Kivilahti;

  • V. Warner;

  • G. Muhalek;

  • L. Bikos;

  • A. Gillis;

  • N. Judges;

  • W. Damstra;

  • D. Pasquino;

  • S. Jordano;

  • M. Wallace;

  • N. Fasi;

  • A. Weiss;

  • G. Langille;

  • K. Bendikas;

  • D. Doward;

  • S. Ani;

  • Kade;

  • Robert;

  • K. Pagniello;

  • Ezra;

  • N. Branscombe;

  • J. McRoire;

  • Frey;

  • A. Hassen;

  • D. Friesen;

  • H. Chapman;

  • R. Bloomfield;

  • Unknown;

  • D. Boyce;

  • R. Unknown;

  • C. Villeneuve;

  • B. Samuels;

  • C. Tustian;

  • B. Amendola;

  • Justin;

  • Trin;

  • A. M. Valastro;

  • Unknown;

  • M. Walker;

  • D. Prout;

  • Reid;

  • S. M. Chitty;

  • J. Hanks;

  • Tee;

  • Kevin;

  • H. Tallman;

  • Unknown;

  • B. Couto;

  • S. Lake;

  • J. Wareham;

  • Unknown;

  • E. Unknown;

  • L. Farhan;

  • Cassandra;

  • Alison;

  • H. Ancer;

  • M. Moussa;

  • Margarette;

  • M. Aden;

  • Murilo;

  • Bieno;

  • Nicole;

  • Rachel; and

  • Emmanuel

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by H. McAlister

Seconded by A. Hopkins

Motion to open the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That pursuant to section 33.8 of the Council Procedure By-law, the Committee BE PERMITTED to proceed beyond 6:00 PM.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That Committee RECESS at this time, for 20 minutes.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

The Committee recesses at 6:31 PM and reconvenes at 6:56 PM

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by A. Hopkins

Motion to close the public participation meeting.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

4.   Items for Direction

None.

5.   Deferred Matters/Additional Business

None.

6.   Confidential

None.

7.   Adjournment

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the meeting BE ADJOURNED.

Motion Passed

The meeting adjourned at 9:54 PM.

Full Transcript

Transcript provided by Lillian Skinner’s London Council Archive. Note: This is an automated speech-to-text transcript and may contain errors. Speaker names are not identified.

View full transcript (6 hours, 15 minutes)

Hey, if everyone can just settle down and if you’re on council, take your seats, we’ll convince in a moment. Good afternoon, everyone. This is a third meeting at the Budget Committee. The City of London is situated on the traditional lands of the Nanashbek, Hodeshone, Nanawak, and Adam Wandren.

We honor and respect the history, languages, and culture, the diverse indigenous people who call this territory home. The City of London is currently home to many First Nation, Métis, and Inuit today. And as representatives of the people of City of London, we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and live in their territory. For everyone’s information, I have counselors, Hillier, Bammer, Bergen, and Layman, joining us virtually this evening.

Counselor Stevenson has sent her regrets for the evening. All their counselors are present and in chambers. The City of London is committed to making every effort to provide alternate formats and communication supports for meetings upon request. To make a request specific to this meeting, please contact 519-661-2489, extension 2425.

I will now look to members of committee for disclosures of pecuniary interest. Seeing none online and in chambers, we have one item on the consent items. Looking for a mover and a seconder for that, it’s the 2024-27 multi-year budget reconciliation to the public sector accounting board financial statement budget. Moved by Councillor Cudi, seconded by Councillor Lewis.

Any discussion on this item? Okay, calling the question. Chair verbally, I’ll vote yes. Councillor Cudi, closing the vote.

Motion carries 14-0. Thank you. I’ll also note that Deputy Mayor Lewis has a commitment briefly at seven o’clock. So if I should say if I highly suspect we were still going at that time, in which case he will leave and come back as his schedule permits, as he has award issue he needs to take care of.

Our schedule I am tonight, which is why most of you are here, is the public participation meeting. This one is going to start with a brief staff overview, just to tell us how we got here, to frame the conversation for tonight, and for the information for those attending. And then we will commence the public participation meeting. Mr.

Murray. Thank you and through the chair. And I’m just going to see if I can share my screen here and. Okay, and your microponies go a little bit closer to you as well, just for the- Absolutely.

Okay, so through you, Madam Chair, this is a snapshot of where we currently stand after the conclusion of the previous budget committee meetings. So the gray dotted line that you see on screen was the mayor’s proposed budget. And then the purple line reflects the amended budget based on the decisions and the amendments that council worked through at budget committee. So based on where we currently stand, we are an 8.7% tax levy increase for 2024, an 8.8% tax levy increase for 2025, 5.8% for 2026, and 6.8% for 2027.

That represents a four-year average of 7.5%, which is what you can see in the orange dotted line. Thank you. For the public participation meeting, I will need a mover and a seconder to open the public participation meeting moved by Councillor McAllister, seconded by Councillor Hawkins calling the question. Councillor Cuddy.

Yes. Closing the vote, motion carries, routine to zero. Thank you. Before I start my speakers list, I wanted to welcome everyone from the public who joined us tonight.

Just for everyone’s information, we have council chambers full, as well as three committee rooms are full as well, and a number of people wishing to speak who have joined us virtually tonight. And I have no one registered to be a delegation or a speaker via the phone. So as we go through tonight, you’re welcome to speak, you’re welcome to observe. We have a number of communications already submitted to us directly and on the public agenda.

We’ll rotate between the council chambers. We have four microphones in here, two on the upper level, two on the lower, and each committee room also has a microphone. I will ask for the space that you’re in, realizing some people have used different modes of transportation, including paratransit to get here, that if they certainly indicate that they’re about to miss a ride, or they would like to speak, that we just make space for each other. I haven’t seen any kids before the meeting started, but if they’re there too, sometimes they don’t last so long for longer meetings.

So welcome to everyone. This is our opportunity to hear from you. You can pose questions to us, just know that we won’t answer them directly, nor will staff this evening. We’re here to listen.

You have up to five minutes. I time everyone equally, and I do give about a 30 second wrap up. You can certainly say that you agree with another speaker and just add on to their comments. I do hold decorum in chambers in the committee room.

So I ask that there’s no clapping, booing, applauding, realizing that we share diverse viewpoints. We won’t make sure that it’s a safe and welcoming environment for everyone to have their stay in this budget process. I ask that when you come up to speak, you say your name and then spell it, just it is part of the public record. And I like to make sure that we can recognize the power of your name and its proper spelling.

I do not need your address. That was an old procedure. I do not need it. You are welcome to eat and drink and use the washrooms, as you will.

They’re in the hallways, and that applies for chambers and the committee meeting rooms as well. And I would say that no room is overly comfortable per se and the committee rooms are warm today and the benches and chambers, I know that they’re uncomfortable. So I appreciate you saying through this, we go until we’re done. I’m anticipating it’s gonna be a longer evening, probably five plus hours.

And at one point, we will break as committee for we could use the washrooms in refresh as well. So just a heads up for that. Okay, so I’m gonna start in council chambers. There is a microphone.

If you would like to line up at one, I will start in chambers. I will do a few rotations of chambers and then I will start into the committee rooms. For anyone who’s a speaker, virtually with us, I will do a few rounds of in-person speakers before I start on that list as well. And I will announce your name if you’re a virtual and had signed up before I get to you.

So it will, you’ll know it’s coming. Okay, so for technology, I’m gonna start on the lower left side of council chambers. Yeah, so the lady at the microphone, if you wanna just state your name, give me one second, we kinda go together. I just, I’m doing her introduction for her.

Okay, it will all count as the same five minutes. And I don’t know if you wanna adjust the microphone, just it’s a little bit late. Why wouldn’t I get five minutes and my guests wouldn’t have five minutes? Yeah, I just, we don’t normally introduce each other, which is fine, but I would also say that the rule— It’s that special.

Yeah, I’ll just, I’ll be very quick. Perfect, that’s fine. I will just say for anyone that you can only speak once at this meeting. So if you think of something later, you’ll have to whisper it to somebody else if you forgot to say something.

It really is just one turn tonight. So use your time as you will. You have up to five minutes, but you can only speak once. Thank you.

My name is Jeanette Cameron. I reside in East London. I have brought someone who I have met in pursuit of bringing fresh ideas for change. Her name is Sherry Ann Pastuck.

From early on, Sherry has always been passionate on causing positive change within herself and others, getting acceptance to the University of Waterloo, obtaining an honors in health science, focusing on health promotion and disease prevention. While geared for medical school, she simultaneously became passionate about achieving optimal health through exercise, nutrition, personal development, and aiding individuals as a certified fitness instructor. Upon graduating, she started her career in the Canadian healthcare system. She has worked with decision support performance and quality improvement departments within many Ontario hospitals within her 23-year career.

She has a desire for the system which led her to being the educational coordinator for UMNO. Sherry has worked with multi-million dollar hospital budgets while knowledgeable about the funding formulas and critical performance metrics utilized by the government. Spear-headed the development of real-time reporting to hospital administration for key data and performance metrics. She utilized her skills of corporate level performance improvement combined with behavioral management tools and monitoring one’s habits and routines with her end goal of creating transformational change within the individual.

She feels that health and wellness require a holistic approach and personal accountability. As a small business owner that she has built from the ground up, Sherry opened a gym from an initial budget project plan construction, data and software application with ongoing operation management. She also was four years as a volunteer educational coordinator within her hospital position and her interest for enhancing growth within data, quality and reporting. Sherry acted as the educational coordinator and she demonstrates skills in government health, private business and individual pursuits.

Please welcome Sherry, thank you everyone. Thank you for that, welcome. Yes, I state my name again, it’s Sherry Ampastic. I have been a member of government agencies and spending and also witnessing from both within the system and outside of the system and this attention to the matter of it was the homeless hub initiative and the city, the homeless situation in the city of London and that how we could do better for the people here with this generous budget amount that is available to do transformative change.

What I would like to see though is not, if you consider just as an analogy, if the city was facing a chronic, if just the problem was obesity, would you then open up a bunch of paid for fast food franchises and then offer liposuction? I don’t think that’s really gonna cure the problem of obesity. Some of the studies of biome and the work of Dr. Gabour Matei, I think who spent a lot of time in the Vancouver inner cities, I think some of his work, I don’t know if it is or is not ever reviewed much of the operational plan and the proposals as I could have if that is tied in to just looking at a different approach.

And with all of this, could it not be just a pilot? Is there not other ideas? Where are we gonna get significantly from my work in the healthcare system? It was data, data is the new oil.

Has there been consensus upon which data points are gonna be collected? How are they gonna be collected? What indicators are gonna be prepared to be reported back to the public? How many people have we served?

How much did it cost per visit? How much did it cost per person? Some of the numbers that I’ve seen are extraordinary. We could be doing so much better for one individual, but yet none of, and if the program proceeds as follows, there’s no healing work into the trauma because trauma usually precedes addiction which usually precedes homelessness.

It’s not all case per se, but it’s a large percentage of it. So if we don’t start to create solutions and treatment that look at how these people got here, you’re just gonna be feeding a monster and as issues such as immigration and continued economic pressures of inflation increase, we all know that we’re only gonna see a rise in homelessness. We’re only gonna see a rise in addictions. We’re only gonna see a rise in all of this, and we know that, but can’t we just try to do a little bit better than a band-aid solution?

And I would just strongly encourage a different approach where data is key and central. We’re reporting back to the community metrics that are transparent with both financial and also product performance outcomes. How many people have succeeded? Have we reintegrated any of these members, are these suffering homeless back into functional members of society?

There should be outcome goals where we could do better. We could learn and you could actually become a center for change, not just for shoving them over in a corner and they need to know that people care. They need to know that somebody is looking at where their individual hurt come from, that somebody cares about them. And as a city with the resources, you’re really the only ones that are able to help.

Our religious institutions are broken down. Our families are broken down and they really need a holistic approach to be served and to be healed and to be cared for. In all of this, something that really might work in healthcare, which when you’re trying to inform this performance improvement, it is about the data. And collecting that and reporting it back in scorecards with metrics was how things changed and monitored and in that we should be also doing this at the personal level and so my personal interest about habit improving and where I seen great change in people and seen them change their whole lives and their struggles.

I’ve helped a breast cancer survivor learn how to exercise and grow her life into something that wasn’t before. That was the greatest joy that I did and helping people is amazing. But that just got down to really what are we doing and monitoring our own habits and actions. 30 seconds.

And if we could bring this into some of these homes, we do want to change for the ones who do want to change and can’t we give them even tools to monitor their own change and give them data as well and help them in changing their own personal performance so that we’re all aiming for the same thing, which is wellness. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll also note as I mentioned in one of the committee rooms and I want everyone to be aware of it that if you prefer to send, prefer, or would like to send it in addition to speaking tonight, written comments can still be submitted in advance of the deadline is tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.

If you would like your thoughts to be included on the public council agenda, I’m going to go to the bomb on the right side in the gallery next. And if you’re speaking to a specific budget case, please be sure just to tell us which one it is and then try and keep our comments tight onto budget items itself. Welcome in your name, please. Yes, it’s Fred Swart, is the mic on?

Okay, I’m Fred Swart from Scotchpine Crescent and I’m representing the street that we live on. It’s concerning sidewalk changes. So I’m a resident of Scotchpine Crescent. I’m sure by now all of the councilors have received the email of February the 24th regarding sidewalk on Scotchpine Crescent.

In June 23, we heard of a public meeting at Sherwood Forest Mall and it was attended by our Mayor Josh Morgan at the time. He wasn’t married yet, but he is now congratulations. Possible sidewalks on Scotchpine Crescent, which we then expressed as a no sidewalk vote because we kind of walked around and said what do you want? And everybody said no.

We’ve had no notification of any kind that a PPM regarding sidewalk was going to happen. Other streets in White Hill had been contact and had been given the opportunity to object and having their street exempt without consulting the residents of Scotchpine. Sorry, sir, I’m just pausing your time. I’m not sure if this is regarding sidewalk snow clearing or building versus sidewalk exemptions.

It’s building sidewalks. It’s putting sidewalks on the street program and it’s also concerning the budget as well. Okay, please proceed. Yep, been contacted and has been given.

So other streets in White Hills have been contacted and it’s under five minutes, by the way. Other streets in White Hills have been contacted and had been given the opportunity to object and have their street exempt. Without consulting the residents of Scotchpine Crescent, our street was approved for sidewalks that we as residents did not want. Two years ago, Scotchpine was on a low priority list for sidewalks and now suddenly it was raised to a high priority without hearing consultation or anything.

In the research that we did online, your high priority list indicates that 1,000 cars drive down Scotchpine Crescent daily. When in reality we took account, we have a retired high school teacher on our street and the count is 375, which puts us in a low priority and pedestrians 39 daily and that is by our own count in a 12 hour window, which also puts us in a low priority for no sidewalks, for sidewalks. A number of us residents that have lived here for 30 to 50 years and are quite content with our street the way it is. We find there is no need for sidewalk.

It was never requested and we submitted a petition to let the council know that we did not want sidewalks. We did this once we found out and it is only yesterday that I realized that the council had gone ahead and put this into action. It’s already been voted on apparently. I did not realize until I talked to my council of Corrine yesterday.

We therefore ask our council to vote according to the low priority rating of no sidewalks. We hope to introduce or ask for another public participation. Yeah, so I appreciate that. It is not anything that this budget committee itself.

It’s coming. Okay, I’m gonna need it soon. And it’s very, very, you know, important, thank you. So in June 2023, we first heard, I covered that, the expenses, no, let me finish this short paragraph.

We’ve had no notification of any kind that a PPM regarding sidewalk was going to happen. Other streets in White Hills had been caught. So I’m gonna need the budget, topics itself. That’s what’s pertinent to that right here today.

Yeah, okay, I appreciate that. The whole thing is an expense and we had other meetings have suggested that this money instead of a sidewalk, which is not warranted and I was told we could express anything at this meeting ‘cause there’s also people for homelessness and so on. So I’m thinking I can speak here, is that correct? Yeah, there is specific funding when the budget for— The funding is included because it’s very expensive to put a sidewalk in, correct?

So we have, if you just let me finish this half a paragraph, I’ll get to that. Other streets in White Hills have been contacted and have been given the opportunity to object and have this street exempt. Without consulting, the residents of Scott Pine Crescent, our street was approved for sidewalks that we as residents don’t want. We heard nothing about this.

Two or three years ago, Scott Pine was in a low priority list. Now it’s in a high priority list. We have way under a thousand cars. It’s 375 by our own count and at the last budget meeting, we stressed because of the expense and you wanna cut budgets.

30 seconds. Exactly, we expressed and suggested that you use this money for traffic lights on Gainesville and Limber lost. It was also suggested that the thousand car traffic was on Limber lost. That’s south of Gainesville.

On our street north of Gainesville, it’s 375. Again, low priority. So we suggest use the money and we have requested lights for 30 years, I really want to impress this on the council. I see three kids running across the street and if the money could be spent there, if the money could be spent there.

Okay, so if the money could be spent there, we appreciate it. - Thank you. And you are connected to your councilor, so you have that according to it too. All right, thank you.

  • Thank you. To IT, the top microphone on the side of the gallery, please. I believe there’s a speaker at it. Yeah, just state your name, please, and you can start.

Yep, my name is Adrian Ziloway, Z-Y-L, A-W-Y. I know my time is brief, so I’ll just get to what I wanted to say here. I come as a father of two young children who lives and works in South London and downtown and have my whole life. I’ve also worked within the law enforcement community for the last 15 years in a civilian role, including at times with some of the fine men and women of the London police force.

As such, the majority of my career has been spent studying and providing strategic advice on the subjects of crime prevention, deterrence, and mitigation. As such, I could not be more invested in addressing criminality in the city in the most efficient manner possible for myself, my family, and the city as a whole. That’s the entirety of my agenda. What caught my eye about the recent discussion around the need for additional police resources in the city was the continued use of London’s ranking among municipalities in the crime severity index.

Now, a realization I came to early in my career in this area is the importance of recognizing the limitations and the context of statistics, particularly in relation to police work, where it’s not an exact science to put it mildly. Nevertheless, is that is the statistic that’s largely been used to drive the narrative on this issue. I wanted to see what the underlying data said. And what became immediately apparent is I believe our new police chief was actually underselling the success of the LPS in the last 10 years in minimizing the growth of the crime severity index.

In fact, of the 10 largest municipalities are Ontario cities outside of Toronto. London has seen the least amount of growth in the index over the previous 10 years coming in around 6%. That’s less than half the growth seen by Niagara, Barry, Oshawa, or Ottawa, and glaringly less than Guelph and Kitchener. Looking at it this way, proponents of increasing police funding would likely suggest London must have seen substantial growth in terms of boots on the ground in order to maintain that, but in fact, the opposite’s true.

While other municipalities have increased the size of their police force from anywhere from 7 to 15% in that time, London’s number of officers has, for all intents and purposes, stayed static, fluctuating between 597 and 2014 and 603 in 2022. To contrast that, Guelph grew their force by 15% in that time in Kitchener Waterloo by 10%. And despite that, both saw the largest increases in crime severity index rating provincially. This dovetails with nearly all the research on the topic, which clearly shows that past a certain point, there is essentially no correlation between police funding, increases in crime reduction.

Another important point that I haven’t seen raised in a public forum is the Ford government’s recent dropping of the requirement for post-secondary education to become a police officer. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m the last person to equate post-secondary education with intelligence or competence, but it is relevant in this instance. Because this will unquestionably lead to younger applicants who may not have the life experience or the level of learned critical thinking that has previously been seen as a necessary bar for entry. The chief himself said in the last annual LPS report, officers are responding to increasingly complex and dangerous situations.

It’s hard to see how lowering the threshold for experience and education at a time when those characteristics are needed more than ever will help alleviate the root cause of the problems we see. So in summation, London has the lowest growth among the 10 largest cities in Ontario and the crime severity index over the last decade, with the least amount of growth to the number of officers. They should be commended for that. Conversely, those police forces that have grown their resources have not seen a commensurate decline in their crime severity index.

So despite these trends in their own data, the LPS is requesting nearly three times the increase in budget year over year of any other municipality. It’s a request simply at odds with their own data. Law enforcement and community organization are both necessary components of an effective strategy in addressing a variety of the problems we see. However, neither is sufficient on its own and the data clearly suggests they should be funded much more proportionately than they are right now.

I also think it would be a great sign of acknowledgement of the work of these organizations and with an eye to future collaboration by the LPS for them to follow their own data and willingly hive off some of their requests to give to these partners. These are organizations that need a financial influx as most of them make use of less than 1% of the budget that we give annually to police. Trimming even 5% of the LPS ask won’t undermine their long-term plans, but it would indisputably bolster the critically important work being done by community organizations and programs and groups that are helping make a direct impact on the day-to-day safety, security, and well-being of the citizens of our city. Thank you and should any member of council wish to discuss any of my findings, I’m happy to make time to do so at your convenience.

Thank you. I’m gonna go to the microphone on top of this side of the chamber first. I will say one thing, knowing that some people came as groups tonight, you’ve seen how I rotate microphones and move around that if you’re not gonna use all your time and you wanna share that same five minutes with somebody who came with you, maybe you’ve carpooled, maybe they’re a support person, you can do that, you’re still confined to that five minutes but you can only speak once, but just I know some people have come as groups. So I’ll leave that to your discretion how to use your time, so top microphone.

My name is Maya M.Y.A. and I currently attend King’s University College for my fourth year of study in Social Justice and Peace Studies. Within this program, I was able to take part in placements that were targeted in helping the marginalized population in London, Ontario. During my time at this placement, I’ve noticed a serious issue with the number of unhoused individuals that are living in our city.

Our city needs more affordable housing to prevent people from living in unsafe environments on the streets. I’m arguing for more money to be put towards business case 14, the municipal developmental resourcing. I want everyone to imagine for a moment the uncertainty of not having a place to call home. As a student, I worry about finding affordable housing after graduation, but what about those among us who already are struggling on the streets?

The reality is our city has failed its people by neglecting the basic human right of shelter. Business case 14 focuses on more money being allocated towards affordability of quality housing to ensure people feel safe. Furthermore, for students like me, getting affordable housing is really hard nowadays. Rents keep going up, but our incomes don’t.

And if our income goes up, well, so does the cost of living. It feels like it’s impossible to find a place where we can afford without sacrificing safety or quality. The stress doesn’t just affect our living situation, it makes it tough to focus on our studies and stay mentally healthy. Without more affordable housing, the citizens of London, Ontario are struggling to build a better future for themselves.

The middle class is slowly turning into lower income when it comes to the housing market because prices are way too high. I would like to discuss business case number 14 more in debt. I strongly advocate for increase funding towards this initiative because allocating more money to staffing and support from marginalized groups will contribute to making our city a safer place. With better support, I’m confident that we’ll see a reduction in homelessness and an improvement in the well-being of our community.

This focus on marginalized groups fits well into my next point. The lower income people are severely affected by the increase in the housing market. To prove this, I just ask everyone to listen to these facts. There are over 2000 homeless people in London, Ontario last year.

That means there are twice as many homeless people in our city now compared to 2020 when there was just over 900. Furthermore, around 60 of them died on the streets due to reasons such as hypothermia, health and safety reasons. This is very sad to see. As Canadian citizens, we are failing our own citizens.

This can be addressed by implementing more affordable housing so more people are not forced out of their homes due to not being able to afford rent. If the current situation remains as is, at this rate, and the homeless population increases, and the cost of living increases, and the funding of these projects remains constant, we can only imagine the tragic number of losses we will witness in the coming years. Therefore, I propose we allocate more money towards affordable housing. After having researched various ways of utilizing this funding, I found a great option that I think would be the most optimal.

The House of Hope operation is a great idea. If you aren’t familiar with this operation, it was a former hotel that got turned into homes for homeless individuals. 25 homeless people are now being housed. There’s also 24/7 security and support on site.

We can begin by starting small, targeting a quarter of the homeless population and help our citizens remain in housing, or more especially, get back into housing. As we conclude today, I urge each member of this council to reflect on the urgency of this cause. The struggles of students like me and the high numbers of homeless people show the urgent action is needed. Our city’s failure to address the affordable housing crisis cannot be ignored any longer, as this is affecting our current population and future generations to come.

That is why I think it’s a great idea to invest more money into the municipal development resource in case, otherwise known as business case number 14, because housing is a right and not a privilege. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll go to the lower microphone on the side, if you just state your name.

I’m Peter Watson, W-H-E-S-O-N. I’m a resident of Ward 6 as small business owner for 34 years, and I’ve been in London for 48 years. I’m here today because I’m concerned about the future of small businesses in our community, including my own. I hear of robberies, vandalism, graffiti, theft on a regular basis.

It’s not like it used to be. Prime is on the rise. There’s obviously diamond dash problems. There’s gas and dash problems.

Carjacking is becoming the norm as the cost of everything is going up. These businesses are mom and pop businesses. They’re small family owned businesses, and at some point they’re just trying to keep the lights on. I know some business owners who lose sleep at night because they have another claim for their insurance because of vandalism.

If the message in our community is crime pays, then for some business owners, it’s easier for them to say no thanks and walk away. They close their shops. They go somewhere else, and we lose jobs. As a taxpayer and a long-term resident of London, this alarms me.

I’m encouraged, particularly, by the investment in this police budget to hire more officers and expand the foot patrol unit. I’m glad the city’s taking a serious look at improving police response times, and more officers will do that, and small businesses are actually counting on that kind of improvement. We must feel safe in our community, and attract others to come here, or our economy will stall and suffer. Let’s protect London’s small businesses and jobs.

Counselors, respectively, I ask you to please pass this budget. Thank you. I’m going to the lower microphone on the side of the gallery, please. Hi, I’m Nora Fraser, NORA-H, F-R-A-S-E-R, and I’m a co-chair of the Council of Canadians London chapter.

The Council of Canadians is a national organization. We campaigned for universal public pharmacare. We’d lobby the federal government to build affordable housing. We agreed that the federal tax revenues should be shared more fairly with municipalities.

On the provincial level, we protest against Bill 23, the legislation that is added to the city’s expenses. We work with the Ontario Health Coalition for full funding of public healthcare. We agree that the ODSP rate should be doubled. Certainly, the province should do more to address the housing and homelessness emergency.

You may know that I spoke at a press conference about public transit. We are encouraged that you voted for London Transit to get the funding for added service hours. Of course, we’re not happy that the money for transit was then taken from the Climate Emergency Action Plan Reserve Fund. As climate change continues to affect our city, we will need more money in the Reserve Fund for adaptation and mitigation in the near future.

As Brendan Sandwells explains so well, spending less now will cost more later. But today, I want to draw your attention to a really bizarre moment in the budget debate last week. A few years ago, our Blue Community Committee worked with city staff and asked council to declare London a blue community. One of the commitments of a blue community is to assure that nobody’s municipal tap water is cut off because of an inability to pay their utility bill.

London was able to make that commitment because we have the Housing Stability Bank. The Housing Stability Bank program currently supports around 1,900 individuals and families who are at risk of homelessness. The bank helps them to stay housed by providing grants and interest free loans to help pay rent and utility bills. Of all the business cases that address housing and homelessness, surely this is the one that most immediately and effectively prevents people from being forced from their homes by unaffordable expenses.

They can get a loan or grant from the Housing Stability Bank. The bank needs more funding so it can help more people. I thought it would be obvious that counselors who are worried about people losing their homes would vote to add funds to this program in P-16. But to no surprise, I heard a counselor say this.

How many more people does that added 0.1% tax hike add to the back of the land for help? It’s an infinite feedback loop, he said. The correct answer to the question is none. Business case P-16 would add $3.13 per year to the average residential tax bill.

Nobody is likely to need the help of the Housing Stability Bank because of a $3.13 increase in taxes. The feedback loop is not infinite. It stops when we help our neighbors. Unfortunately, a majority of counselors apparently didn’t question the infinite feedback loop fantasy.

With the best of intentions and not enough time to look at the actual numbers, they voted against funding P-16. The Housing Stability Bank will not have enough funds to note the needs of some organizers who are in fact facing the possibility of homelessness. Mayor Morgan and counselor, please consider raising our taxes by an average $3.13 a year so that the Housing Stability Bank will have enough funds to help more landowners who are at risk of homelessness. Thank you.

Thank you. I’ll go to the microphone on the side top. If you just state your name for us, please. Hi, my name is Audrey Rollo.

I’m from the East End of London. And I would like to speak from the perspective of most of the people who chose to come to the rally outside of City Hall today. I am 18 years old. I have just entered the adult world.

Some could say I have fresh eyes. But I have lived in London my entire life. I was born in Victoria Hospital, spent half of my teenage years at the Central Library branch or on the Cove in the South End, I believe. I love London and I love the people in this city more than anything.

But I see them suffering every day. The woman down the street with me with dementia, she begs for food at the end of her driveway in a nightgown because there are no mental health support workers who can support her, no personal support workers. I see people get chased out of the abandoned Kelloggs factory down the street just looking for shelter from the rain. I see kids that were at my high school that I graduated from last year struggling with homelessness and trying to get their grades up and find a way to just make it work in this system when they have voiced to me personally and to everyone who will listen, that they feel utterly and completely unsupported.

These small individual experiences reflect a greater image of London that I think has been pervasive for way too long. I am 18, I have been talking about these issues since I could talk. It has been too long and by the time that we are going to have budgets like this, reassessed in a serious way in a way that could actually bring change, I will be 25, I will be 30, I will not be the youth anymore. Sorry if I’m sounding angry, I am a little bit frustrated because the general consensus from the people around me, my age up to like 90, every age, they are scared and they are unsure and we have a government that we feel does not support us or advocate for the true rights of the people who live in this city.

Council, I know it is not your intention to make us feel unsupported or unheard, but I believe it was last week that meeting, I felt unheard and I felt unimportant and unprioritized to you. I am a type one diabetic and I am struggling to get a secondary education because of the fact that I am not accommodated through student plans, through medical plans, through anything. My 18 year old best friends from summer camp, their insulin is being cut off and exchanged for a like, off brand wacky version that does not work anymore. My 68 year old grandma is experiencing the same issue.

I know that there are differences in provincial and municipal spending, but that is ridiculous. I propose that we invest more in the unhoused, in the mentally ill, in the postnatal, in those who are new to this community and who need help because Council, I have a really specific, really important question for you, starts with yes or no, ends with a lot more conversation. Do you believe that if given every resource that they need, every London citizen has the ability to be a good and productive member of society? Do you believe that?

And if so, why are you not acting like it? Every single Londoner, especially the people in this room and in the overflow rooms, have the ability to be good, productive, impactful members of society? And they already are, but they are not being treated like that and it’s just, there is a disconnect. We are the voters, we are supposed to have the power and you are supposed to reflect.

That power is not being reflected. Why are you, which is a youth initiative to support unhoused youth and people experiencing mental health issues and employment barriers? They have a weeks to months long wait list for their youth emergency shelter that has just opened on Clark Road. I know people that have been waiting for months to get off of the streets and they are under 18.

They are only reported to be 2,000 unhoused people in London, which already is a double increase in people from before the pandemic. But the amount of people that I know that are unhoused and unaccounted for puts that number closer to 10,000 probably, 5,000 at the minimum. These people are not being heard. They are not being supported.

They are not being respected. And I’m sorry, but in my entire 18 years of living, I have never seen an improvement or a change in that beyond people trying to save face and seem like they’re being progressive. That’s all I have to say. Just please act like the people in your city have the ability to be good and to make an impact and to have good lives if they are given the resources.

That’s not being reflected right now. That’s all I have to say. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing your personal story with us today and your authenticity.

I’m going to go to the chamber’s bottom on the side, please. Oh, bottom. It was up there last time, I’m sorry. Yeah, just your name and then I’ll start your time.

Gary Manley, I retired Ford Supervisor for 42 years and I’m a perfectionist. I have suggestions on how the city can save money. I haven’t got complaints. And one of the ones I want to bring up is in over 100 American cities, the police and the fire department are joined.

And I think in London, because we have 14 fire stations and what have I got written down here, 416 firemen, we have a lot of help available for the police. They could learn to direct traffic or go on investigations that they’re looking for a body or for clues for something like that. But this is not 1940 anymore. We have, I think, less fires because of the systems we got and we’re not heating the house with wood and we have alarms for gases and that.

But they’re both looking to make the city better and healthier. So why not join them? And if you wanted to find out the excess of it or the success, go down to the States or call the States and see how they’re doing down there. But they’re both here to help us get a better life and not have danger.

So why not make them one thing? Another thing I had that we had a while back at the plant was the employees that are doing the jobs have a lot of good ideas on how to save time or save money. Why doesn’t the city open up one of those? But just do it once one week a year, otherwise you’d be overwhelmed.

But the people that are doing the jobs have a lot of good suggestions, I’ll bet, on how to save money and then you pay them off with a percentage of the money that they let you save. And that’s pretty good. And I just want to give them, I got 10 minutes and they only have a five minute talk, on your traffic lane signs. I’m driving down the road all the time and it says the lane is blocked and it’s not.

Why not make revolving signs? One side it says the left lane’s closed, the other side says the right, and then have them turn the point on the end to the traffic so that you don’t see the sign. Because it seems that roads aren’t anybody’s problem anymore. Like, what is the story behind the bicycle traffic lights which are all the same color as the light beside it?

But I’m sure it costs a few thousands to put them in. I don’t, nobody can explain that. And then the little curbs you put for the bicycles to go around the curb, if you’re turning right around one of those things and there’s a car over the white line going the other way, you can’t turn, it’s blocked by that car. Anyway, that’s all I got to say, thank you.

Thank you. I’m going to go to the microphone on the top left and just before our rumor starts, it’s up to five minutes, there is no 10 minutes. Please go ahead. I’m old and haven’t got a good name right?

Okay. Hi, my name is Susie Shockeram and I am a fourth year student at Western University studying psychology and social justice and peace studies. I am here today representing Antler River Rally, a grassroots community organization dedicated to restoring the health of Deshkin Zibi, also known as Thames River. Antler River Rally is passionate about educating Londoners about the importance of a healthy river to our city, which is what I am here to further advocate for today.

I will be speaking in favor of business case number 63, Silver Creek Ecological Enhancements. The Silver Creek Ravine is located in the coast, which is one of the 21 ESAs in London and environmentally significant area. The coast is located near the core of the city, west of Warren Cliff Road between the Thames River and Baseline Road West and it covers more than 47 hectares. Silver Creek Ravine is located within the coast downstream from an older neighborhood without substantial stormwater infrastructure.

This lack of proper infrastructure has created issues such as channel erosion, woodland degradation and fish habitat destruction. This case is so important because if these issues continue, our city’s environment will be greatly impacted. For example, excess channel erosion can create gaps between habitats that are vital for many aquatic species. It can also pose as a threat to any nearby property and can lead to flood and erosion hazards.

This makes the business case both environmentally and socioeconomically crucial to our city. The lack of stormwater infrastructure is also resulting in woodland degradation, which is something that our city must protect and cannot afford to lose. With so much of our woodlands and forests being urbanized and uprooted already. Another impact of the improper infrastructure within the Silver Creek is the loss of fish habitat.

The Thames River is home to nearly 90 species of fish, many of which are already at risk and endangered with habitat destruction being one of the leading causes. So it’s important that we work towards repairing the Silver Creek Ravine. As stated in the business case, to not fund and act on this project and its causes can be considered a violation of the Fisheries Act, Endangered Species Act, and the Conservation Authorities Act. Therefore, we need action and proper funding from the city today.

The goals of this project include establishing channel stability for the water quality and habitat, enhancing riparian habitat, and providing a stable location for a pedestrian bridge. Not only does this benefit London’s watersheds and overall health of our river, but it can also result in socioeconomic benefits. By repairing the stormwater infrastructure, managing this ESA and building a pedestrian bridge, it will help to ensure all learners have access to free recreation. The pedestrian bridge will also allow for people with disabilities to have barrier-free access, which will allow all individuals to enjoy nature.

However, none of this can occur without the funding required from the city today. Therefore, I ask that the mayor reevaluate their decision and please consider the environmental and socioeconomic risks of not proceeding with this business case. London is known as Forest City. A title I and many others are proud to hold.

However, neglecting our ESAs and not protecting our environment will have detrimental effects for the future of our city. With so much urbanization and woodland degradation, the environmental areas which do remain in London, like the Silver Creek Ravine, are so important to protect and restore. I was born and raised in this city and have seen firsthand so much beautiful and green land be destroyed to be built upon. I am happy to see London grow.

However, it cannot be at the expense of our environment. Without a river and beautiful greenery, there is no London. We must protect and restore our city’s environment before it’s too late. This business case may seem like something easy to put off, but doing so could have detrimental impacts on our city’s future.

We can avoid this. In fact, we must avoid this. 30 seconds. So I urge city council and the mayor to please reconsider and include this business case in the multi-year budget.

Together, we can protect and restore London’s environment and stay green for our city forever. Thank you. Thank you. This is where our night starts to get fun.

I’m going to go to the gentleman at the microphone in the gallery here. And then I’m going to go to committee room five. And this is where the committee rooms don’t know what number they are per se, which would be the person in a black hoodie. Yes, that person.

You will be next, so just get yourself ready. This microphone first, please. Okay, my name is Vincent Lebron of the third. L-U-B-R-A-N-O.

I live with my wife, Chris, on Mackenzie Avenue in Old South. And although I am appearing here today for myself, I did want to mention that I served the city as I’m a member of the integrated and cycling advisory committee, where I serve as the active transportation on the active transportation subcommittee as its chair. I want to start by saying that I am in full agreement in giving the police all the funding they need to hire new officers, new staff, new communications, a new training facility. Any of the resources that they do desperately need.

But I say that with one caveat. They do not need a $492,000 armored vehicle, a second one that will sit next to our unused first one. Yes, we have crime, but to say that we have the type of crime that requires a tank is ludicrous on its face. No matter what data was cherry picked to create the dangerous city scenario, we are not a dangerous city.

And to say so is either purposely mendacious or at worst, or disingenuous at best. Due to the climate of fear created by such statements, important programs have lost funding for the sake of an unneeded tank. The library, the arts, organizations that help serve our forgotten vulnerable populations just to name a few. These are the very entities that help make London a vibrant city.

A vibrant city is easier to police because in a vibrant city, the people own the streets, not the criminals. The ironic thing is that the half a million dollars spread, if the half a million dollars was spread around to the right organizations, this would help the police more far more than any tank. It’s also my understanding that Councilor Hopkins has a motion to be heard that would reduce the police budget by 5%. Getting rid of this tank would be the first, would be the first good start for that.

I thank you for this chance to speak to you tonight. Thank you. So Committee Room 5, the microphone should be alive and all you will need to do is start speaking and state your name, please, and we’ll test the microphone that way. Hi there, my name is Ruth Kivilati.

I’m a Ward 4 member and I’m deeply concerned about the increased proposal to the police budget. From what I know, I believe that we’re in this predicament because we haven’t put prevention, education, support, things of those in nature on the forefront. Instead now, we’re doing Band-Aid solutions because we haven’t prioritized community in the beginning. I’m concerned that more police means more arrests, more folks incarcerated, more folks being brought to hospitals, more folks being brought to shelters.

From what I know, from working in social services in our city for the last 20 years, these services are at capacity or well beyond capacity. So my question is, we can absolutely have more officers on this street, but what’s next at jail? We’re gonna have to fund a jail because as I know, Exeter Road is already bursting at it, seems at 200% capacity. So what are we gonna do with these folks that we are going to arrest?

It makes no sense to me to put millions and millions of dollars into essentially nothing that will prevent any of this in the long run. It’s just gonna create more and more spending and more and more need for increased budgets and a police state. Furthermore, I am concerned for our community members who are people of color who are indigenous, who do not feel safe with the police, who actually feel increased risk of not being safe with the police around. What does the state of them?

I urge you, all of you, to consider this police budget and the extraordinary costs. Thank you. I’m going to go to, it’s gonna be a long night for me mentally. The top gallery on this side, and then I will go to committee room three and it’s somebody else at the lectern in that room.

So just FYI, that’s where I’m going next. Your name and please proceed. Hi, my name’s Veronica Warner. I live at 1142 Commissioners Road West.

London, Ontario. I’ve been a homeowner for 27 years and a business owner, small business for about the same amount of time. I’m here tonight to represent the supporters that I have in West London Ward 9. I’ve ran for the election two times, both time losing out to our council and our Hopkins.

With respect to council, I really like the budget. I see so many things that are getting approved and worked on that have been years waiting. So in that regard, kudos, thank you. And the other regard is to the senior citizens that live in West London.

I work in a salon, so I do their hair and Anna knows who they are. And they live in their homes and they’re alone, barely scraping to get by. So I’m here to ask council to consider a senior’s property tax deferral program that will allow these seniors to stay in their home. And the taxes will be, it’ll register against their land title and secure their loan.

So basically it’ll be a loan for them to stay in their homes as there’s no rentals in West London for them to go into. Everything that’s being built is condominiums. They don’t want to buy a condominium. We have all seen how the developers and their condominiums put up the condo fees every year and levy the condo fees.

I’ve seen since the pandemic, seniors have had to move from their homes because a condo corporation decided to give them another $30,000 levy on top of their condo fees. Anyway, to make a long story short, I’m here for the senior population in ward nine to ask that this council have a heart and please, don’t raise their taxes, 33% over the next three, four years. They can’t afford it. There’s nowhere to go.

There’s no rentals. There’s no, they’re not even on a waiting list for these old age homes. So, and I mean, other than that, I would say that, I understand that council’s looking to increase your pay. Please think about the seniors before you start doing that.

Thank you, that’s all. Thank you. Committee room three is next. If you want to state your name and then proceed.

Gus Mahalik, London North Center. I’m just recently a senior and I’m gonna speak against the police budget because over four years, it’s $672 million, half a billion. And it’s, I’m gonna increase our property taxes, 4.2% on top of the 4.6%. So, as a senior, I don’t think we should go with this police budget.

And you should be looking at the seniors and the property tax owners. People that own houses are paying a fortune for taxes. And taxes have to go down. I remember when Joe Fontana was in it, it was 0%.

And that’s all I have to say. Thank you in chambers lower left gallery and then I will proceed to committee room one, which is the room that has not spoken yet. Please proceed. Good evening, Mayor Morgan, city councilors, budget chair Palosa and fellow community members.

My name is Dr. Leslie Bicos, a former London police service constable with a decade of studying policing. I come before you today to express my grave concerns regarding the police budget. Consistently, the justification for the police budget has been grounded in language that promotes fear, arguing that increased police spending will decrease crime rates, making our city safer.

Many black, indigenous, racialized folks, women, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, unhoused folks, folks living in poverty, disabled folks, street involved folks, and the many intersections of these communities who are most likely to experience violence and harm by the institution of policing have clearly shown support for the reallocation of funds to community-led supports and services. Both the police and city council have made commitments to address anti-black racism, truth and reconciliation, and anti-oppression initiatives in our city. This budget, including the harmful rhetoric, used to justify it and its impact on the increased criminalization on harms of folks marginalized by systems of oppression does not support these commitments. LPS has provided data that we are the third highest city for crime rates in comparison to the big 12 in Ontario.

The data not provided indicates that we are actually trending down in overall crime severity by 10%, violent crime is down by 15%, and non-violent crime is down by 7%. This is not to invalidate the very real issues our city must address, but it does indicate a pattern of going in the right direction that should be included as part of the decision-making process. LPS was approved last year for extra funding to hire 52 new officers to address the same reasoning of this budget ask. Complex calls, higher crime rates, clearance rates, and officer workload.

Have they hired these 52 officers? If not, how can you justify funding 97 more? There’s also a recruitment crisis happening across the country. What happens to the public funds when they are unable to recruit a total of 149 officers over the next few years?

As I understand it, that money goes into their reserves. This is unacceptable. We know marginalized folks are most at risk for police violence, criminalization, and not receiving help when they contact the police. So who exactly becomes more safe by increased policing in communities?

Additionally, LPS receiving up to 10 mental health/addiction calls per day with an average of four people being apprehended should give us all pause to consider the layers of harm and trauma on folks already in crisis. How exactly is this leading to safety in our community? We must prioritize properly funding the community-led supports we currently have, while also steadily building infrastructure that allows us to divert these types of calls away from the police. It’s clear, to address calls for service and response time, you must address the myriad of things police currently respond to that they shouldn’t, like mental health calls by properly funding prevention initiatives that get to root causes.

People often call the police because they don’t have other options, not necessarily because it’s their first choice. Overall, the harmful impact of the extension of over-policing in oppressed communities, coupled with evidence that increased policing spending has no consistent correlation with these decreased crime, our vital considerations in relation to where the city prioritizes spending. Criminalizing our community members is not the answer, nor is it effective in solving problems. We have decades of data to support this.

Instead of increasing the police budget, we must reallocate money to essential services, community and grassroots organizations, and community-led responses that meet people’s basic needs, connect them to community, and provide a sense of belonging. If we properly fund and resource initiatives we already have, while implementing new infrastructure for additional non-police responses to complex calls best served by community-led response, we get to root causes and prevention with less expense and most importantly reduced harm for people most marginalized in our community. Large portions of this police budget are their wants, not needs. It’s council’s responsibility to sort through what the priorities are within this budget.

For all of the reasons outlined above, I reject the fear-based framing of this budget and do not consent to this police budget. Instead, I demand that council one, refuse to fund the equivalent of $50 million and reallocate the funds to community supports and services. There are multiple items in the police budget that are wants, not needs. The state-of-the-art joint training unit, training unit, yes, sorry, at a cost of $42 million for the first phase.

The second armored vehicle, drones, another incident command vehicle, electric vehicles, body-worn camera and dashboard cams, and tasers for all officers. These items alone value approximately $50 million, or clearly wants, not needs. 30 seconds. - Thanks.

Many of which contribute to increasing surveillance and militarization of the police. Council must act. OCPC as an argument, not to oppose this budget, is not in line with many of what your constituents are asking of you. You’re elected to make our city better for all citizens, and that’s being speaking truth to power, where it is needed.

If the police decide to take the decision to OCPC, let them. They will answer to the community for funneling even more funds away from community supports and services. Thank you. Thank you.

Committee room one. There should be a microphone there. If you just state your name, and then I’ll start your time. My name is Andrea Gillis.

I would like to start with, I echo the requests, the information, the data, and concern of the prior speaker. I asked Josh Morgan to pivot, and not deny the council, I’m not ready to present a motion to have the police budget for the reviewed. No other business unit could raise such horrible issues as their response time, their service, their employee disinfection, as a support for more funding. We recognize from prior speakers that the crime index in cities doesn’t fall with increasing members.

I also noted that in 2023, the chief referenced the safe city that London was on the index of the most dangerous cities. In 2024, can I update you, it no longer is. Council I’ve noted has regrettably, aggressively challenged all other business units seeking funding, LTC, the Ontario Library. Other services such as Ontario Works have had their funding frozen since 2018, and have been asked to absorb a $750,000 transit cost to its services of employees or clients seeking funding.

I notice how gracious the chief of police has been in lauding the needs of other business units and commending their ask all the while knowing that those asks are being denied by council. Those asks are asked to support community services, essential services, one simple ask for $18,000 to fund a security guard at the St. Joe’s Cafe and hub for community services being denied, facing closure March 31st of this year. I volunteered there.

I saw children, I saw boys and girls at homeless mothers and fathers and homeless people. You’re forgetting those people. I am sickened, I am absolutely sickened. I woke up at five this morning saying, what else do I say?

What do I say? A police officer is going to have lower standards. Their salary starts at 50, in 44 months, their salary goes to 107,000 plus benefits. I recognize how gently the chief of police said that the members were his sole concern, just like the unions.

I see that the members are his sole concern. I don’t see the community and the safety of the citizens who are marginalized and disaffected. I don’t see them supported. I am devastated.

I am sad for the future of my grandchildren. I can’t, I can’t contend with this. You hire more police officers. They’ve got 107,000 plus benefits after 40, four months.

Their standards for recruitment will be lowered. You ask for more funding because you say your officers are incompetent to need more training. What was the social worker, the social service worker, the librarian who feeds people who gives them socks, the volunteers who support at no money, a feeding of children, making sure they have milk instead of water, giving them some hope that tomorrow they might be alive. I am overwhelmed and saddened that a mayor who I respect would use his power to deny a motion of a counselor who wants to have the budget reconsidered.

I beg you, I implore you. Funding for municipalities is a fixed bag of funds, taking a lot for police means we have a police state, not a community of people who collectively care for each other. Thank you. Thank you.

Once again, I can see the committee rooms. I’m gonna have to ask for no clapping or no booing, just to make sure I said that it was a safe. And your mic is still on, so I can still hear you. Yeah, so I am going to just need to quorum in the rooms as there’s gonna be speakers on multiple sides of the issues today as we move through this process together.

I’m returning to council chambers and I’m going to the, Natalie, you need to, you’re ready? Okay, so I’m gonna go to the top microphone on this side. And just again, to anyone in the committee rooms who have transportation needs, just make yourself known and I will go to you to accommodate your needs. Yeah, and then just your name when you’re ready.

We’ll make sure that microphone’s picking everything up. Hi, good afternoon, my name is Natalie Judges. And I’ve echoed many, many times at these council meetings about the need to improve paratransit service. Our paratransit service is broken.

It’s unreliable. There’s been many, many times where I have missed medical and specialist appointments because I cannot get rides to these appointments. This is very frustrating to the user of the service. And I just wanna echo that for many, many years, we and myself have been here to ask for change to this service.

And years later, I think about 10 years later, there still has been very little improvements to the paratransit service. I understand there’s been a budget for about 10,000 service hours, but to a growing disabled community of Londoners, that means nothing. Our service needs to be reliable and our service needs to be proactive. I would just like to say to the councilors to please consider the disabled members of the London community so we can have a reliable paratransit service.

Thank you. Okay, those are all your comments. Yeah. Okay, perfect.

I’m going to go to, and thank you for coming today and as always, the lower microphone on this side, please. My name is Bill Demstra, D-A-M-S-D-R-A. I’m here with my wife of nearly 62 years, Ena. And we’ve been taxpayer and people in the city of London for 55 years.

And we would like to address this meeting regarding the city police. While we’re proud, called city of London home, we are also increasingly concerned about the safety in the city and the crime rate. We don’t feel too safe anymore. We’ve had our car go through several times and when I forget to lock it, which is unfortunate, so far it has not left our lane way, but it is a little discerning in the morning when you come and everything is upset.

The criminals seem to not get punished for what they do. And it’s a little bit out of control, my way of thinking. So it’s time to take action now. I know I would hate to pay more taxes.

Tax it is a word that nobody likes to pay, but it needs to be done. And so we would need more officers to patrol our streets. We need more officers to be visible in the community. And a little pet peeve, that doesn’t mean that the officers sit in a parking lot and talk into each other.

We have to send the criminals a strong message. If you steal something or break into somebody’s home, that they will be caught and be punished. We need more officers to patrol our streets. And that is the only message that these bad guys will understand.

So Ina and I were here today on behalf of our neighbors with a simple direct request to you, Counselors. Please pass this budget because public safety is the most important issue Londoners face right now. London should be a great place to live in, not just for people like us, but for the future generations, for our kids and our grandkids and great grandkids. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you. Going to the top microphone on the side, please. My name is David Pasquino. That’s P-A-S-Q-U-I-N-O.

I’m a chartered professional accountant and the director of finance at a London not-for-profit organization, which does not benefit from in any way from the city budget. I have an undergraduate degree in criminology and I have acted in more than 20 local community theater plays over the last 10 years. I love theater. I want to thank the mayor and all the counselors for their hard work on this budget, believe me.

I know it’s not much fun, but I have appreciated all of the discussions and information shared. I emailed all the council members, my analysis of the city budgets from 2002 to 2027 using the budget information available on the city’s open data portal. Specifically looking at the base budget funding for the museum London, the London Public Library and the London Art Council’s community arts investment program or LACCAPE. And compared it to the base budgets of the other agencies, boards and commissions or APCs, as identified with the help of the city’s finance supports department.

This comparison was inspired by Mayor Morgan’s explanation as to why he cut the requested base budget increases for the library and museum London so that they were quote more in line with the average increases for all agencies, boards and commissions. I won’t bore you with the details, I could. I really could. But suffice to say that when I pulled out the information specific to the library, museum London and the LACCAPE base budgets for the last 22 years and the next four in either of the draft or the mayor’s budget, all of their average annual increases over that period were significantly less than the average annual increases for the overall group of ABCs.

Unfortunately, I could not identify the grand theater’s annual operating budget grant as I think that that’s part of one of those transfer budget lines. The point is while looking at a snapshot of the 2024 to 2027 budget, it may seem fair to treat all of the ABCs with the same maximum increase. But looking at the big picture from 2002 to 2027, it is not in the slightest bit fair. On another note, I am supportive of most of the police budget, but not all.

This is a painfully huge budget and I sincerely hoped that the police board and their finance team would take the opportunity and the feedback they received to find some areas to trim. As someone who puts together annual budgets, I know it’s not easy, but it is always possible, always. They could have looked like heroes. Instead, I feel like they have us in a chokehold, forcing their budget down our throats who are reaching deep into our pockets to pay for it.

Yes, more personnel are needed, but 189 positions. That’s one area that could be trimmed or spread to a fifth year, but business case P-29, another drone, a vehicle dedicated to drones, a second light armor vehicle, electric cars given the problems encountered in January? No, quite simply no. These are not necessities.

They are, as my mother would say, niceties, which brings me to my final point. The message that the London Police Association posted on Twitter or X or whatever on January 29th endorsing the proposed police budget was shameful, to say the least. And I believe in direct conflict to page two of the mayor’s budget that Mayor Morgan specifically drew attention to. The steps towards anti-racism and anti-oppression at the city of London.

The people responsible for that endorsement and anyone who publicly supported, I believe, should be reprimanded and required to attend diversity, equity, and inclusion sessions. To sum up, counselors, you still have an opportunity to reinstate the requested base budget increases for museum London and the library, and bring back business cases P-8, P-39, P-38, 39, and 45 in their entirety so that the arts and culture in this city are supported at the levels they should be. And you can reduce the police budget cases P-28 and P-29 to pay for them. Because yes, you do move funds around from one department to another when making adjustments to budgets.

One last thought. During the February 15th budget meeting session, Mayor Morgan said, quote, that the London Public Library won’t cease to exist if we don’t give them exactly what they’re asked for, end quote. Doesn’t that also apply to the police? Maybe they can still be heroes.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to go to committee room five next, which was the person in the black shirt who seems to be a knitter. And then I’ll come back in chambers to the lower microphone on this side.

So please state your name and then I’ll start your time. My name is Stargazer Giordano. That’s S-T-R-G-A-Z-E-R Giordano. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops.

Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops.

House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops.

Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops.

House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

House the homeless instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops.

Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

Address climate change instead of funding cops. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops.

Instead of funding cops, provide mental health resources to people who need them. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Instead of funding cops, just house the homeless. House the homeless instead of finding cops.

And instead of funding cops, maybe address climate change. Instead of funding cops, maybe you could provide mental health resources that aren’t there or are inadequate. I speak from experience, by the way. House the homeless instead of funding cops.

Instead of funding cops, one thing that you could do instead is house the homeless. And you could house the homeless instead of funding cops. Those people who are sleeping on the street, that they’re homeless actually. They don’t just choose that.

Instead of funding cops, you could house them. You could put them in a house so that they don’t have to sleep on the street and wither away. That would be cool. Address climate change instead of funding cops.

Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops. Maybe even from the library, that would be nice. There’s just so many options. Instead of funding cops, you could do so much.

672 million, baby, I can’t even pay my rent. Like, that’s a lot, you know. Provide mental health resources, maybe. You know, maybe even address climate change.

You know, that might be a priority. I don’t know if you know about climate change. House the homeless instead of funding cops. Address climate change instead of funding cops.

Instead of funding cops, house the homeless. Instead of funding cops, house the homeless. Instead of funding cops, house the homeless. Instead of funding cops, house the homeless.

Instead of funding cops, house the homeless. Hey, I have an idea. I have a different world. Instead of funding cops, you could house the homeless.

And house the homeless don’t fund the cops. Or fund the cops less, at least. Give them something. Give them, like, a house.

That would be nice. Provide mental health resources instead of funding cops so that people like me don’t die. Because the mental health resources that are currently there have failed me. And the only reason I’m still here as a sexual assault survivor, as a transgender woman, as a neurodivergent woman, as a survivor of abuse, physical, and verbal of 17 years in my childhood home.

20 seconds. - I need mental health resources. So if you care about my life, you can, you know, maybe give, like, a little bit more money so that maybe they can actually work for me. And, you know, where could you get that money?

Maybe you could get it from the cop budget. I feel like there’s, like, enough money within the 672 million dollars going to the cops to, like, put just, like, a little bit into that. Just a little bit. - Thank you.

That’s your five minutes. No. - Okay. Going to the speaker of Lower Gallery on this side.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Mike Wallace from the London Envelopment Institute. I want to start by saying, I want to thank Council for the work on this budget and staff on this. I know it’s been a difficult year with some change that, with a mayor’s budget over the processes we had before.

So, and you’ll hear a lot tonight, and I’m glad I’m at the microphone at 5.30 and not 8.30, but, and there are lots of challenges facing this council, and I appreciate the work that you do. We are wanting to be on record that is probably the largest property tax payers as a group in London, that 8.7% is difficult. When we talk about affordability, whether it’s for a purpose-built rental that we do, whether it’s for a sick family home, whether it’s for multifamily homes, whether that’s for townhouses, so on. People forget that the property tax plays a significant role in the cost of the ability for those who wish to attain housing, whether that’s through rental or through ownership that that place.

The paper has it about, right? I think about $14 per $1000 of assessment is what it’s going up. So, if you look at your own tax bills when you get home and you’re paying, let’s say I’m in an average house probably, maybe it’s slightly higher, but not much. My own assessment is just over $500,000.

So, there’s 500 bucks a year that in additional tax this year, another 500 or more next year, because it accumulates. It’s 30% over time. We just want to be on record that, we know this is a challenging budget. We know you have some issues that you need to deal with, but affordability needs to still be at the front of your thoughts when you are looking at budgets going forward to see if there’s a, can’t do much this year, if there’s some opportunities for the next year on a four-year budget process, which we appreciate that just for your budget process.

The other thing that we wanted to mention that since we’ve been following this fairly closely, there has been some discussion about boards and commissions and others who sit, and there have been the recommendation that maybe we should look at assessment growth as a way to fund some of your ask going forward. We don’t really have an issue with that, but it’s all a closed loop. It is our industry that provides the assessment growth. The C builds nothing, the industry builds everything, and so we want to continue to work with you and with staff to make sure that we can continue to grow this community so that you have the assessment growth, to be able to fund all the demands, won’t get them all, the demands that you’ll hear over the next a few hours, and through this budget process.

It is a closed loop, it’s all related, and we just wanted to be on the record that we want to build a better London, and we want to build it a better London for everybody who lives here. And it’s through assessment growth that much of that can be done. Thank you. Thank you.

At this time, there’ll be an ever so slight pause. I just traditionally, as per procedural bylaws, if we’re going to extend past six o’clock, I need a motion to do so. I’ll get it taken care of now, the way moved by Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor Ferra. It’s going to be a vote in e-scribe to extend this meeting past six o’clock.

Closing the vote, motion carries 14 to zero. Thank you. We still have just for anyone online, or in one room and can’t see the others. A lot of the room, all three community rooms are still going.

Council chambers is full, and I do have about 20 people on Zoom as well. For those on Zoom, I have not forgotten about that speaker’s list. Just some of the people in person have lined up about an hour ahead of us starting, so trying to get you in line of when you came. So we are here, we’re still going, and we’re going to the top side of this gallery microphone, your name and please commence.

Hello, my name is Nada Fassie, and I’m a 22-year-old student, currently my fourth year at King’s University College, doing a double honors major in French and Social Justice and Peace Studies. Also, not to mention a proud volunteer of the Arc Aid Mission, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the ongoing homelessness issue here in London. Now, before I continue, I’d like to preface our gratitude, that homelessness and low-income housing issues are a priority for the Council, with various business cases that have included homelessness attention and prevention. Unfortunately for London, this issue is one that is still ongoing, making it more difficult to retract solid and effective solutions.

To start, I’d like to shift attention to common comments coming from individuals who are living at 241 Simcoe Street, an area that is commonly known for homeless members beginning their journey into being housed in London, Ontario. People knocking on my door for drugs, prostitutes, I just don’t feel safe at all, so I remember living in the apartment. Someone needs to hear what we’re going through. Both of us are on disability, and it’s not right.

They take advantage of people that are on disability. These quotes deserve a careful analysis. I am here to support your business cases, P-20, road map to 3,000 units, enhanced portable housing benefit program, and P-22 L-M-C-H service improvement plan. Starting with business case 20, enforcing this case will allow people to receive a covered portion of their rent or other expenses so that they can keep their housing.

Many low-income individuals suffer from displacement when they are not able to cover a single month of rent. If one suffers from this downfall, this may allow the individual to give up on their housing and leave them to end up on the streets. This should be highlighted, since not being able to afford rent is one of the most common reasons for homelessness, with rent often being 30% more than their income. The next business case, business case 22, pushes the second part of my main focal point today.

This business case allows for an improvement plan allowing maintenance of general safety in these buildings and increasing the professional staff that will regularly check in on enhancing the quality of life for tenants, whether that’s checking in on their mental health or cleaners to help prevent pest management and other safety hazards these buildings may suffer from. The manager of community engagement with London Middlesex Community Housing says that these tenants are not far from successful living, and these issues they raise, they come from lived experiences of long periods of trauma and addiction. These are the ones who need the most support. Both of these business cases touch on the essential need for funding for longer-term stability and housing.

Unfortunately, this crisis is not one that stands on its own. It’s not a single, not a double, but a part of a three-headed crisis of addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. In the pursuit of justice, let me paint a picture for the council chambers. I could stand here and tell you a story or two that might leave the entire public with an unsettling taste in their mouths, knowing the extent things may come to for fighting for survival on the streets.

The one I will share with you today began when I had done the outreach program with staff, and I hear a story of an individual sleeping in a cold, filthy dumpster to be woken up by a truck almost crushing him. No, stop, stop. There’s human life in there. The coordinator was waving their arms around viciously to stop the dumpster truck.

The reason for the man sleeping there? Well, this leads me back to my main point. He got kicked out of a housing unit because of his inability to pay rent after losing his job during COVID-19, as well as the overdose he partook in during this occurrence. Respect in members of the council.

This is not just a story. It is a reflection of the injustices of shelter that is provided here in London for so many folk. And while we are all here sitting comfortably, some are keeping warm and piles of garbage and heatless tents. Thank you, councillors and Mayor Morgan for your time and consideration.

Thank you, microphone, on the top side of this gallery, please. Hello, my name is Andrew Weiss, A-N-D-E-R-E-W. W-E-I-S-S-S is in the SAM. I’ve been a resident of award 13 for over 10 years.

I have a very simple message that I implore you to consider and to internalize, and that is use good data. I would like to tell you a little bit about myself, so you will listen to me, perhaps. I am very lucky to have received an excellent education from the University of Western Ontario, Western University, with the masters in theory and criticism. I also got an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

And I have served as an academic editor for more than a decade. Academic editing, editing in general, has shown me the importance of clarity and precision in argumentation and in language and in taking action as well. If my words are not clear, my message has no meaning. If my actions are not made for clear reasons, they will have no impact that I intend.

What I would like to urge you to consider is that the argument that the London Police Services are making is a poor one. The City of London is not a dangerous city in a way that justifies the increased budget of 30%. Especially when it involves cutting services for mental health, crisis mental health, we’re very lucky in London to have CMHA 24/7 walk-in mental health care. It is severely underfunded and deeply urgent.

We need LTC, we need paratransit, we need WIOU, Museum London, arts and culture are not a luxury, they’re a necessity, and they carried me through some of the hardest times in my life. And I know that as a person who suffered from anxiety disorder, feelings are not a good guide for action. And if the London Police Services wants to try to inspire fear in the citizens of London, we should not take that as a good guide for action. We should use good data.

And I have a study in my hand from Seabrook at all. I’ve emailed you a link to a copy of this. It’s published by the University of Toronto Press through the Journal of Canadian Public Policy. I’ll read you the title and just one line from it.

Police funding and crime rates in 20 of Canada’s largest municipalities, a longitudinal study by Seabrook at all. It collects data from Statscan and other publicly available data from 2010 to 2021. This line I think is particularly worth mentioning, quoting, “No consistent associations were found between police funding and crime rates, cross municipalities and overall, net increases in spending per capita are not associated with greater net decreases in crime rates.” So when the London Police Services tells you that we need to increase funding by 30%, there is no good data to justify this conclusion. The conclusion does not follow CDNF.

It’s a abbreviation that’s been written on 1,000 undergraduate papers in philosophy. And it applies to this claim that’s being made by the London Police Services. So I urge you to consider not just feelings. It’s worth respecting people’s feelings, but it is also imperative that we make a good use of good argumentation and make good use of good data.

And so when you’re called to make a vote on this police budget increase, please understand that it is not too late to say no. Hamilton City Council said no to the police budget. They sent it back. It was reduced.

Toronto City Council also sent back the police budget, and it was reduced. It is not too late for London City Council to listen to the constituents of London and ask for the budget to be sent back. It is not justified by good data. Please, once again, I’ll say it one final time.

Please use good data when you make this decision. Thank you. Thank you. Going to the lower microphone on the gallery on this side, and then I’ll be looking for Christina Bendicast on Zoom.

My name is Genevieve Langel. That’s spelled G-E-N-E-V-I-E-V-E, and then Langel L-A-N-G-I-L-L-E. The syllogism that we need more funding for policing to prevent crime is fallacious, because it doesn’t address the root cause of crime. And part of that root cause is rampant economic inequality.

People are pushed to commit crimes when you literally extricate from them their basic rights to shelter and housing. And their reality is that that petty crime is just the crime police choose to deal with instead of the moral acts that go unnoticed and permitted, because they are not committed by people the lower income, but instead by people on the sunshine list. A lot of speakers have been pressing that evaluating data is crucial, and I agree, but I also want to give you some more pathos. The predicament of housing in London is despicable and depressing.

There are numerous tents lined up on hiking trails next to the river by Blackfyres Bridge. The other day when I passed that long string of tents, police had stuck in order to someone’s tent that they must leave. The next week when I was walking by, the tent was gone. Do you understand how sad it is for the citizens of London, for the people hiking and biking by that area, that this is the police force that represents us in dealing with our most vulnerable population?

Why is it that in London numerous people downtown are sleeping on the cold bare sidewalk? And how can you go about your day pretending that it is okay to have people live on the streets of the city, you inhabit and that you are counselors for? The speaker before me who skipped me had seemingly valid reasons for wanting more funding for police officers. He was concerned about his wife and his own belongings about people breaking into their car.

But the fact is that police officers often don’t even come for those crimes until the next day or at all. They don’t prioritize the real needs of members of our community. As that guy said, police officers are sitting around in their car eating donuts and sadly his call for more funding to them won’t change that. The London Police Department wants to pretend that there’s rampant more serious crime they must address and that their already enormous budget is insufficient for that.

However, that’s a veneer for the fact that those funds are likely going towards fleet upgrades, body cams they will often turn off in a light armored vehicle, which is especially ludicrous considering it would glorify the general dynamics who have been unjustly exporting those light armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The reality is that fixing the issue of homelessness would largely eliminate much of the work police do and providing housing would do that much better than funding those police who disproportionately target BIPOC, people with mental health concerns and our most vulnerable populations who would feel much safer with community oriented solutions. Obviously this is a contentious issue that many people have different sides on, but it’s clear that the crisis of people sleeping on the street in entirely unsafe conditions is much more of a priority than any sort of funding for police who are increasingly less educated and less trained. Consequently, I hope you consider where your priorities lie when you pass each homeless person on your way home and each building you see under far his name.

It is in fact feasible to provide social safety nets like addiction counseling or universal basic income so that no one suddenly becomes homeless and it is possible to procure housing for people that already are unhoused. And that it’s part of London’s commitment to those issues to do something about it. And I hope you prioritize that, thank you. Thank you, looking to see if Christina is available on Zoom.

Perfect, we can see you and hear you. You have up to five minutes, please proceed. Great, thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Christina Bendikas, Christina with a K, Bendikas is Bell B as a bicycle, E-N-D-I-K-A-S.

My concern is with the police budget request and council’s response to it. First, let me be clear that I’m not opposed to some increase in the police services budget. I am willing to pay more in property taxes for additional officers who are adequately trained to handle the complex situations they now face, who have the right equipment to do their job safely and effectively and to lower response times. But I do resent having to pay more than I think is necessary because of a lopsided process that is devalued the broader needs of this community and created an atmosphere in which criticism of the bloated police budget request is viewed as sacrilegious.

I know that more officers training and equipment do not come cheap, but is there any budget proposal that cannot be trimmed just slightly? How about 1%? A half a percent or even 0.07%. Does council truly believe that Chief Truong cannot come up with any way to save some money in his budget?

For example, the armored vehicle, an expensive piece of equipment that is rarely used. Prior to 2020, the police borrowed one from the local OPP when necessary. Is that no longer possible? The Ontario Police College enamours only 35 minutes away.

Can some of those facilities or the equipment be shared to cut back even a little bit of a $200 million that will go to London’s revamped headquarters and a new training center? I am sure that the chief could find some savings, but I am at a loss to understand why certain city councilors don’t think that should be his concern. Even when the police budget alone raises our taxes by 5%. I am at a loss to understand why certain councilors don’t think that other underfunded organizations need what they have requested, but the police need every dime.

Even though the crime severity index quoted by the chief shows that both violent and non-violent crime in London declined significantly in 2022. 1% of $672 million the police budget request is $6.72 million. I think of how much that could do for paratransit and public transit, social programs and housing. 0.5% of $672 million is $3.3 million.

I think of how that could be used by our libraries, the performing arts and museums, cultural entities that bring people to our city, especially to the downtown, where their presence acts as a natural and enlightened deterrent to crime. Of all the cuts this council has made, it has not amended the police budget by even 1%, not even one half of 1%. It has not even dared to trim 0.07%, the cost of a second armored vehicle, almost $500,000 that could be better spent elsewhere. My counselor in ward 11, Skyler Frank has dared to propose viable alternatives to the excesses in the police budget, and I thank her for her courage and her wisdom.

It troubles me to think that some city councilors are afraid that the police would appeal any amendments to the province. And I wonder why are they so intimidated by a legitimate part of the process? But it troubles me more to see how much easier it has been for city council to take from those who haven’t political clout or strong unions or any mechanism to appeal their decision. In conclusion, I know that not every budget request can be fulfilled, but no single request should be held up as untouchable in the way that police budget request has been.

And I’m asking this council to amend it. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I’m gonna go to the lower microphone on this side, and then committee room five will be up after that.

Thank you. My name is Douglas Doward, D-O-U-G-L-A-S, last name, D-O-W-A-R-D. I’m here on behalf of the London downtown condominium advocacy group, and we’d like to let it be known that we would like to support the police budget. The London Police Service is a big ask.

It’s a big ask because it’s been underfunded for more than a decade. It’s now understaffed, it’s ill-equipped, and it’s under-facilitated because of the continued, because we have continued to see ourselves as a small town, but we have to look at ourselves as a big city with all this big city problems. Foot patrol officers are our most broadly trained frontline officers who are in contact with those who are ill-advantaged on the streets. These officers must assess their needs, their endangerment, their lawful rights.

They must get them to social agencies or emergency facilities. They can be as kind or as forceful as lawfully appropriate. Our officers know these people by name, and they know our officers. We need a facility where officers can be trained to their best ability.

We can’t compete for new recruits when we don’t have basic on-the-job tools like body cams. We need better communication tools. Body cams provide a permanent record of police call events, saving the taxpayers’ money from bogus lawsuits because of the time and the investigations. The criminals are emboldened by how disadvantaged our London police are in terms of preventing and arresting them.

Thank you. Thank you, microphone, top gallery. Thank you, honorable counsel. My name is Shweta Ani.

I am an SGPS student from King, and today I wish to speak on business plan number 12, strategic building and property acquisition in the housing affordability crisis. Today, London, Ontario faces a critical challenge regarding housing affordability with many individuals and families experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness. This problem disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including low-income families, seniors, and individuals with disabilities. Existing housing policies and initiatives have fallen short and effectively addressing this pressing social issue, necessitating innovative solutions to increase the supply of affordable housing options.

A recent study reveals a sharp increase in the number of home buyers and renters relative to the number of new homes completed, particularly evident since 2014. The discrepancy between housing demand and supply has exaggerated the housing shortage, resulting in soaring prices and rents across the province. My recommendation centers on the implementation of business plan number 12, a strategic initiative aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing while fulfilling the city’s commitment to create 47,000 dwelling units by the end of 2031. This plan establishes a revolving fund to fund a purchase existing properties in the open market and repurpose them for residential use, targeting marginalized communities in need of affordable housing options.

And the impacts are, as so, implementing business plan number 12 would serve as an advocate of social justice, bringing in transformative impacts for marginalized communities in London. At its core, this plan directly confronts the pressing issue of the housing affordability by offering safe and affordable housing options tailored to the needs of vulnerable populations. By repurposing existing properties often overlooked and underutilized, the plan optimizes available resources to effectively meet the city’s housing needs. This approach not only addresses the shortage of affordable housing but also empowers marginalized communities, my apologies, by providing them with dignified living spaces and fostering a sense of belonging within their neighborhoods.

As well, one of the most compelling aspects of business plan number 12 lies in its financial sustainability and efficiency. Unlike traditional government-funded housing initiatives that rely heavily on taxpayer money, this plan operates as a self-sustaining revolving fund by leveraging funds generated from the sale of repurposed properties. The plan eliminates the need for additional taxpayer contributions, alleviating the burden on public finances. Furthermore, the reinvestment of proceeds back into the program ensures a continuous cycle of funding to support future acquisitions and developments.

This innovative financing model not only maximizes the impact of limited resources but also fosters the sense of fiscal responsibility and accountability within the program. As a result, business plan number 12 offers a financially prudent and sustainable approach to addressing the housing affordability crisis in London. As well, in addition to addressing housing affordability, business plan number 12 presents a significant opportunity for job creation and economic growth in London, Ontario. The implementation of this plan would stimulate activity in various sectors of the economy, particularly in construction, real estate, and related industries.

As properties are acquired, renovated, and repurposed for residential use, many job opportunities would emerge, ranging from construction workers and contractors to architects, engineers, and urban planners. Moreover, the revitalization of underutilized properties contributes to the overall enhancement of neighbourhoods and communities, attracting additional investment and fostering local economic development. I strongly advocate for adoption and implementation of business plan number 12 as a viable policy solution to address the specific issue of housing affordability in London, Ontario. This recommendation is grounded in extensive research on emerging solutions and best practices of affordable housing initiatives.

As Councillors and decision makers, it is imperative to prioritize the implementation of innovative policies like business plan number 12 to create a more just, inclusive, and prosperous community for all residents. By taking decisive action on housing affordability, London can set a president for other cities facing similar challenges and lead the way towards meaningful social change. I urge Councillors to consider implementing business plan number 12 to address the critical issue of housing affordability in London, Ontario. Thank you, and apologies to committee room five.

I told you before that speaker and I messed up my own speaking order. So committee room five, just state your name, and then you’ll have up to five minutes. And apologies again. No worries.

My name is Cade, that is K-A-B-E, and I just wanted to put something into perspective in my short time speaking. The London Public Library has a proposed budget increase of $332,000 in 2024, which is $267,000 less than the amount that LPS will be spending on furniture and equipment alone in the same year. The total budget for that is $599,218 on furniture and equipment alone. Just wanted to make that very clear.

In the London Free Press, Mayor Josh Morgan talks about resources being allocated in this budget. He said, quote, “We’re not going to be able to do all of it. “Where do you want to see us make those maintenance “investments or those new investments in our city?” End quote. I’m here to make it known that I want my tax paying dollars to go towards helping those who are being displaced, not to those doing the displacement.

In my few short years in the city, I have seen unhoused people being forcibly removed from warm buildings for the crime of simply existing. Just yesterday, a man who crossed his street to ask me and my partner for help seemed so incredibly desperate for any kind of support that I frankly couldn’t give him. I don’t have the power to do that, but this council absolutely does. Affordable housing is incredibly important, as many people have said today, but it’s not even the entire picture.

It’s only one part of the equation. There are so many issues happening in the world and specifically in our city that have to be addressed with urgency. Can you imagine if over $600 million was being given to climate change solutions? Shout out to Stargazer.

Education, mental health services, addiction rehabilitation, public transit, libraries, or any of the horribly underfunded services and programs within the city. Any one of those could massively be benefited by that kind of budget increase. And yet we’re giving all $600 million to the LPS. What kind of progress could be made in this city if we invested money into the people and the resources that support them?

Fund community care over police all day, every day. Thank you. Thank you. Committee room three.

Yeah, someone’s at the left. So Robert, I live in South London. I’ve probably lived here for about 35 plus years. So paying taxes of all kinds between all that time.

I’m gonna argue about the police budget. I recently, I have never called the police probably more than four, maybe five times in my whole existence here in London. And unfortunately, the last time had to be very personal. I called to make a missing person report for my son and I talked to them and the officer on the phone became ignorant, became belligerent, became belittling.

And then he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. So as I talked to him and tried to explain the situation, I threw three or four words. I said, the sheep’s over there. And he just went, uh-huh, uh-huh.

So I knew he had stopped listening to me. So I stopped talking. And I said, you’re not gonna do a police report, are you? I’m missing person report.

He said, no, I’m not. I said, why not? He said, because I don’t feel your son is missing. I said, I didn’t ask for your feeling and I didn’t ask for your opinion.

I asked to make a police report of a missing person’s while I’m not doing that. So I hung up the phone. I then called Toronto Metro Police and I talked to them. They made a missing report for me.

They did some investigation. They have been in touch with me. I think, in turn, they had then gone back to London Police ‘cause all of a sudden, about two weeks later, they’re knocking on my door. They’re calling me, oh, can we help you?

Can we help you? Well, I asked you two weeks ago to help me, not now. Luckily, I do have someone on the, uh-uh-uh-a lovely lady did call me for our missing persons and we set up another one here in-in London. But it’s pretty sad that I had to go to Toronto to get them to notify London.

Hey, this is your job. Maybe you should be doing it. So when it comes to the budget and I hear about their wonderful little, their new toy truck that they want to buy, that service was not there for me. That service was not provided.

And I believe it says right on their cars to serve. Well, I certainly wasn’t served. And to this day, my son is still missing. I have yet to hear anything back from the London Police Services about any progress, any searches, anything.

So it really makes me hard to say, hey, I’m going to fork out another three or four or five or $800 a year out of my pocket to defend services of even the basic needs of police services that they don’t do. I put in a complaint about that night. It went nowhere. So more policemen in the lower, lower the times for response sites for calls.

Sure, I understand that. Better training. I thought they were already trained. But anyways, that’s all I have to say.

Thank you. Thank you for being with us tonight and sharing such a personal story and your experiences, looking online to Christine pygneolichaux. Perfect. We can hear you.

Yeah, I’m trying to start my video, but it’s saying, I can’t because the host has stopped it. Okay, just, I don’t know. You want to try again? Yeah, so start my video.

I think the host— We can say it. Oh, perfect. There we go. Thank you.

Thank you. Hi, so my name is Christy Padnello. I am the executive director and a lawyer at Neighborhood Legal Services. We’re a poverty law clinic funded by Legal Aid Ontario and we serve London Middlesex.

I want to speak to you, counselors very practically today about two of the business cases that we are urging you to fund. And those cases are in the budget. They are P-15, Extreme Clean, and P-16, the housing stability bank increase. We understand that to date, there is a reluctance to fund those.

And I’m here to talk to you very practically about from the ground what these two programs mean in terms of two things. And one is preventing homelessness, not having to deal with it as homeless people, but preventing people from becoming homeless. And as well, something I haven’t heard a lot about today, but is essential, and I know important to you counselors, which is protecting our existing affordable housing stock in London and Middlesex. So these are the two reasons we need you.

London needs you to fund these two programs. And I can tell you from our experience in actually helping and representing these people as a legal clinic. The first is that we act for people who are being evicted before the landlord and tenant board for various reasons. I can tell you in our regular existence every week at the clinic, we turn to two key tools that allows us to help keep people housed and not evicted.

And that is extreme clean, as well as the housing stability bank. Extreme clean, which is a low cost, highly effective program, helps where people have been poured in, helps people prepare their units for pest management services. And the effect of that is to keep them housed. Housing stability bank.

Again, low cost program, high effect. It keeps people’s housed because we can turn to them for a little bit of money to add to the pot of money that other people may be providing the tenant themselves, Ontario Works, whatever, that keeps people housed. They don’t become homeless because of these programs. It is crucial.

So even if I’ve heard a lot today about the importance of addressing homelessness and all of that, we all know this is a huge issue. However, what I haven’t heard a lot about, and I know it’s important to you, councillors, and I’m hoping people get their heads around is, and this is sort of a bit of the law around affordable housing and the setting of rents. A lot of people don’t realize that we do have a form of rent control in the province. And that is that for all units built before 2018, the landlord is only able to increase the rent every year by a small percentage for the tenants who are existing in that unit.

So it’s a form of rent control. And it works as long as we keep people housed there. If someone is evicted from a unit that was built before 2018, the landlord is not subject to this minimal rent increase, this 1.5%, 2.5% a year. Once the unit is vacant, and I need you to hear this, councillors, once the unit is vacant, the landlord has the ability to set any rent.

And this is where we see in London in Middlesex, a doubling, sometimes tripling of rent, a unit that was affordable, a unit that had a reasonable rent that was affordable that was gonna gradually increase is now gone, and it’s gone forever. You don’t get it back. It is wonderful that the city is building affordable housing. It is wonderful that they’re going to do that, but it’s gonna take time and money, and it’s gonna take a long time.

And those units won’t be rent controlled. We have to, have to, must protect our current affordable housing stock here in London in Middlesex, now more than ever. So we urge you, we urge you on that basis to look, have a look, grab some money somewhere. These are lower cost programs.

P15, extreme clean, P16 housing stability bank, low cost, high impact programs that prevent homelessness, and even more importantly, keep your affordable housing stock the little bit you got in London in Middlesex. Thank you for listening to me today. Thank you for being with us. I’m going to go to committee room three next, and then I’ll go to Nancy Branscombe on Zoom.

Sorry, I love committee room one. You have not had your chance to speak in a while. Yes, that’s the one. Yeah, so your microphone is just going live, just wanna give one.

So if you just state your name, we’ll check the volume and then proceed. Okay, sorry, we can’t hear you. IT is just working on it. You selected the wrong committee room.

Perfect. So committee room one, your microphone should be working now if you want to state your name again. My name’s Ezra, he’s dead R.A. Hello, good afternoon, evening all.

My name is Ezra, I’m 35. I was born and raised here in London. I’m a disabled person facing both housing and food and safety. Some of you may recognize me as I was recently an ambassador for the city of London.

You know the green shirts, walking around downtown, Richmond Road, what was me for the last year? Immediately before I worked with the city, I worked at the city’s only graduated housing support program run by the art. It was entirely underfunded and was extremely bare bones to say the least, but it was better than nothing. We house homeless people, we help homeless people get back on their feet by giving them housing, teaching them how to live as independently as possible, helping them reintegrate with community and helping them act as various resources such as applying for disability support programs, taking them to doctor appointments and helping them access harm reductions resources.

One such client, you may know, her name was Jessica Beecha. She had received support from us, completed rehab and had left her housing support program to live independently in Woodstock, but to my understanding through the failings and negligence of the London police services and other community supports, she died. Her body was found in the Thames River at Ivy Park in July 20th, 2022, May she rest in peace. In a CBC News article, her death was quoted as being emblematic of her failure as a city.

Later, the graduated housing program I worked at ran out of funding from the city and soon after shut down, meaning all of the people who were housing and helping were trapped out on the street, some of them in the middle of winter on Christmas day. When I started working for the city, I consistently saw these people downtown. It was truly awful and hard watching them suffer every single day, usually not being able to do anything too significant to help them, except provide emergency medical aid and most of these were an overdose. The whole London cares, who in my opinion, as well as many others, can’t support the needs of these people properly and many homeless folk found redundant to while they’re contacting.

The worst part for me was learning to have people from the housing program I worked with died that winter. One man was Gary Fisher. He was in his 60s and he froze to death. May he also rest in peace.

A CBC article from December 21st, 2023, past winter said 260 homeless people have died in London since 2020, however, the number is likely much higher. What was also confirmed during my role as an ambassador with the city was that a significant portion of police calls are about the local homeless people, sometimes erratic behavior. And in most cases, there was literally nothing LPS could do unless the person was posing a serious threat, which was rather rare. Such was the case with Jessica Beacham.

They didn’t want to deal with her, so they took their time showing up when calls were made about her or for her. And as was revealed in a London free press article. Furthermore, I would like to say that I myself have experienced a hit in his violence at the hands of LPS. Violence so remarkable, I have well documented PTSD from it, which restricts me from attending and most activist events as I once did.

LPS has harassed and harmed many activists in this community over the last decade, some of whom I know personally, and in some cases that I have witnessed, I personally written to the office of the Independent Police Review Board about LPS and their conduct, unfortunately, to no avail of me. Go figure as it’s run by retired police officers. What I can tell you with absolute certainty is that the last thing London needs is more police and more money being poured into their surveillance and harm of its citizens, be our police. What we do need is more funding for robust libraries and transit, including pair transit, arts, the museums, homeless, a graduated housing system, an infinitely larger social housing system, more syringe exchange programs, supervised consumption, overdose prevention sites, and programs like the Ambassador Program, which benefited the community so much and despite me having left my role just before the program ended, I believe it was truly devastating, a devastated decision for the community where it took me close down.

Taking resources away from the most destitute populations who need them the most and then policing those populations isn’t going to help anyone and isn’t going to help the city. It didn’t help Jessica and it didn’t help Gary. To reiterate, what others have said, all research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased and law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences. I call for the city of London to defund the LPS and reallocate our funds to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, including social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare, and other community resources.

Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you, looking on Zoom for Nancy Branscombe, perfect. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Chair Pelosi and Councillors.

I have a bit of a voice issue today, so hopefully I’ll be able to get through a few minutes here of a chat and I apologize if I start to crack. Thank you for the opportunity for public partition today. For all points of view to be heard, I’ve actually found all these speakers very interesting. My name is Nancy Branscombe and I’ve lived in London since 2000.

I’m a former two-term ward six councillor and I’m a current member of the current London Police Service Board, the community board that actually the budgets, the budget is the budget of the board, London Police Services Board. So I just wanna make that clear that the police and the police department work through the budget, but the board approves the budget that we brought to council. In a matter of days, the city’s multi-year budget will be finalized, including in this budget, is our board’s plan, excuse me, for a safer city now. The proposed police budget will invest in more officers, safer roads and safer neighbourhoods.

These were the top priorities we heard from Londoners throughout our extensive consultations conducted since 2022. While other cities and have been investing in more officers and modern technology, we are falling behind. The reality is London does not have enough officers to meet the needs of our growing city. London Police has far fewer police officers per residence than some of our neighbouring cities.

911 response times are abysmal for certain types of calls. People are waiting days, even weeks for an officer to show up. The cost of doing nothing is too high. We don’t act now, the situation will get worse.

Crime with no consequences means businesses will close, jobs will leave and people will lose hope. When one person, one family is impacted by crime, all of us feel it deeply as a community. Our board’s plan for a safer city now will make a historic and desperately needed investment in public safety of our community. It responds directly to what Londoners want to see in their police service.

We will hire 97 more officers. We will have the next generation 911 technology so people can get help faster. We’ll have more officers and special constables visibly on patrol and keeping people and businesses safe, whether it’s the foot patrol unit or the core unit. We’ll have 26 specially trained staff who can handle intimate partner violence, sexual violence and human trafficking cases, working in collaboration with our community partners.

There will be frontline officers working proactively in areas where we are seeing more dangerous driving incidents instead of reactively responding only to calls for service. And officers will have the modern technologies like body cams and dash cams that will not only help gather the evidence we need to go after the bad actor, but these technologies will also help keep our officers and bystanders safe on the job. While increasing police transparency in our accountability. For the board, one of the important positions we took, if we were wanting to make this historical investment in our police service, we also wanted a comparable transparency and accountability.

So that was one of the conditions that the board approved this budget. It’s fundamental to our work at the London Police Services Board. It’s been one of the most open and public budget processes in the history of London. We consulted with over 300 community groups and have held large-scale consultations with residents, elected officials and schools.

I was on council for two terms. And this was truly one of the most thorough processes I’ve ever been involved with by a Zoom in person, all the consultations. And for the first time in the police service board’s history, if this budget is passed, we will have a mechanism to ensure the plan delivers results. That was important to the board.

We just didn’t want to hand over money. We wanted accountability for the investment we’re making. Our police chief must report to the mayor and to council on an annual basis on progress. Londoners have told us they don’t feel safe.

We’ve heard you. We’re ready to do things differently. We’ll put more officers on the ground. We’ll keep our roads safe and we’ll protect homes and businesses.

And above all, we will be fully accountable and transparent to Londoners. We cannot continue to fall behind as a city. Our police service is calling for backup. We need to give them the talent, tools and technologies they need to get the job done.

30 seconds. - We are calling. Yeah, we are calling on London City Council to pass this budget in its entirety. Working together, we can deliver a safer city now.

Thank you for your time today. Thank you. Okay, my intention is to hear from a few more speakers and then we’ll go over how the bio break is gonna work for council. So the microphone top gallery on the side, please.

If you want to state your name. Hello, my name is Jasmine McCurry. That’s J-A-S-M-I-N-E, last name McCurry M-C-R-O-R-I-E. I am 20 years old.

This is my first participation meeting. I’m a youth activist in London and I really care about equity and sustainability. This is nothing like Parks and Rec, which was the only thing I had to reference to this. Sorry, we’re just gonna up the room a little bit.

We’ve been hearing a lot of stuff. So I, because of my job, had the privilege to see the mayor’s address to the city and something that really stuck out to me was, you said your daughter addressed local politicians about how to engage youth voters. And you know, you’ll hear a lot about the children of the future and the next generation of voters. And I just wanna reinstate how important that is.

And as someone who, during very important times, wasn’t able to vote, but still had an opinion, I’d like to talk about how you can engage with youth voters as well. So one thing is with participation meetings as well as letter writing, phone calls, petitions, anything that regular public can participate in. Then we also have reaching out to youth and seeing how we can engage with them. But what I’d like to talk to you about today is the protests that have happened in the past couple of years.

And just because they aren’t recently related to the multi-year budget, I don’t think they should be discounted. We have the climate action protests, which saw over 3000 Londoners gather in the streets in 2019, as well as many other protests of smaller scale in that time. We saw the Black Lives Matter protests with around 10,000 people in 2020. And we’re seeing today the free Palestinian protests as well as care over cops, which the rally happens today at front.

And I just encourage you to think about that when it comes to the multi-year budget. We’re not asking for more police. The youth are asking for a sustainable and equitable future. Many of which are calling for defunding of the police as well.

And as you can see, first I’d like to thank you for increasing the budget for service hours for London Transit because of many youth do end up taking this for school and for work. And that is investing in youth futures, as well as equitable solutions for London. However, we are still defunding the climate emergency action plan. And we are funding things like the police, which have been known to direct violence towards BIPOC people.

I’m not personally the person to talk about this. And I don’t want to take away from any of their voices. However, I do want to bring up their efforts. And what we saw with all of these protests is that they were led by youth and they had a large attendance by youth.

This is a way that we can get youth voices heard in a less discouraging way than an email that might get an auto response. I know personally I helped organize the climate action protests. And I know that the Black Lives Matter protests were organized by young women. And that whenever I go to a protest, I see all of these youth speakers as well, whether what part they have in organizing, I cannot specifically speak to.

And then I see all of my friends and coworkers and schoolmates go out to these protests as well. And we see a large youth response. So what I wanted to leave you with is that we should be looking at what the public wants, what the public stands by. Advocacy is hard.

We have jobs and families and extracurriculars in school. Coming to a participation meeting, emailing your counselor takes a lot of work and putting these protests together takes a lot of work. So, and showing up to these protests are really important and take a lot of time from people and seeing these large numbers of people march in the streets. You know that’s what London wants you to support.

Thank you for your time. Thank you. Looking to any of the committee rooms to see if there’s anyone within those rooms who would be reliant on a ride for paratransit or just the next while. Okay, we seem okay.

So going to committee room five. Perfect, your mic should be live. Just state your name and you’re welcome to start. Hello, my name’s Frei, F-R-E-Y.

The $672 million LPS budget increase is unprecedented. As you yourself, Josh Morgan said, “The largest of its kind in London history, “much greater than many other city budget categories. “You state within your budget that, quote, “when compared to the 12 biggest cities in Canada, “London is now the third most dangerous “without any citations. “What does it mean for a city to be dangerous?

“How do you quantify that? “Apologies, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt “and understand that you meant to say “London ranks third in crime rates. “The thing is this figure you took from the LPS “is missing some important context. “Stats Canada actually lists London “as the fifth or sixth and highest in crime rate, “though I’m corrected as a previous speaker stated “that London is no longer listed high in this ranking.

“London in fact is trending down in the following, “10% decrease in crime severity index, “15% decrease in violent crime, “7% decrease in non-violent crime. “So when you say London is now the third most dangerous city, “what are you really saying? “You’re missing important context. “And what that says to me is that you’re perpetuating “a narrative of fear-mongering and falsely claiming “that the only way for residents to feel safe “is through London police enforcement of the state.

“Do you even consider what it actually means “for residents to feel safe? “What black, brown and indigenous people? “What low-income people? “The houseless, woman, queer and trans people, “disabled people, the previously incarcerated?

“Would they all understand as safety? “Because I know for a fact, “it is not police with weapons patrolling our streets “like military men. “The RCMP was created to control indigenous people “through the Indian Act, appointing the RCMP “as ruined officers. “Black people are vastly overrepresented “in our criminal justice system, “making up 9% of offenders under federal jurisdiction “despite only representing 4% of adults in Canada.

“The RCMP and the prison industrial complex “are intrinsically tied to the LPS “as extensions of the state’s control of the oppressed. “I understand your privileged blinds due to these experiences. “But you need to understand that this budget proposal “not only represents but poses as a potential “to more violence, more trauma and a perpetuation “of the ongoing genocide against indigenous people. “This budget proposal and frankly any type of police reform “cannot possibly make your community safer.

“You know what actually makes communities safer? “You know what makes living in London less dangerous? “It’s an investment in not just housing, “but affordable housing. “It’s public transportation.

“It’s paratransit. “It’s food services, it’s accessible healthcare. “It’s free education. “It’s poverty relief.

“It’s libraries. “It’s teachers. “It’s access to nature. “It’s community supports.

“It’s art. “It’s environmental protection. “I can go on. “One million dollars to the TASER expansion program.

“You want to give police more weapons? “The London Police Service Budget Amendments “tell a false narrative “that conducted energy weapons save lives “and reduce injuries. “That TASERs give police the ability “to de-escalate many volatile situations. “How can pointing a weapon at the member of the public “possibly be a form of de-escalation?

“How can the threat of harm “possibly keep the public safe? “Who in the public are you actually trying to keep safe?” Because to me, it is blatantly obvious who you’re failing. $2.6 million for body-worn cameras. Supposedly a means of promoting transparency, accountability, and fairness.

There is no factual evidence that supports Canada’s promise that BWCs have reduced crime. They’re shown to be ineffective in reducing police brutality. Police have the power and discretion to turn on or off their BWCs whenever they like. And they have control over the footage.

You know what, BWCs actually are effective at? Increasing surveillance. $500,000 in a new light armored vehicle. The LPS already has two LAVs.

Donated to them by general dynamics, the same general dynamics that is funneling weapons and supplies to the Israel occupation forces to enact their genocide against Palestinians. But these vehicles are hardly used, often once, twice, or no times throughout the year. The reality is that these vehicles are largely used for public relations at events and at schools so that police can lie and tell the children that having these militarized weapons keep them safe. When you militarize the police in these subtle ways, it makes that militarization normal.

It’s the lie of the thin blue line. We know in reality, there are layers of services that actually protect the public and prevent these situations, not just react to them. We see that in 2022, 99.5% of LPS’ costs of police budget went towards personnel costs. Police make more, and our cities stay poor.

Your six-figure income is a boot on the neck of the poor in the working class. Your lack of urgency and effective measures to address the House’s crisis and a combat systemic oppression disgusts me. Fund health care, defund the police. Fund community supports, defund the police.

Fund emergency medical services, defund the police. Fund poverty relief, defund the police, fund health care, defund the police. Thank you. Thank you.

I was gonna do one more speaker and then look to committee for a biobrake. So committee room three, please. You can test your mic. It should be live.

Thank you. Good evening to members of committee. My name is Alex Andrew-Hossen, H-A-A-S-E-N. And I’m speaking on behalf of Sifton properties with respect to our letter submission and request for expansion of LTC bus services to better service our fast-growing communities, River Bend West Five and Warbler Woods.

In review of the multi-year budget business case 51, it is our understanding that there is no mention of expansion to LTC bus services to service these communities. Further and while it’s acknowledged that an additional $18 million has since been allocated to increase service hours on busy routes, there is no mention of expansion. As of 2024, the West Five community is comprised of 680 homes and 30 businesses with plans of growing to accommodate 2,000 homes and doubling the number of businesses. Warbler Woods is comprised of upwards of 650 homes and 15 businesses and River Bend with upwards of 800 homes and 27,000 square feet of recently constructed commercial space.

All communities having minimal access to LTC bus services. While it’s acknowledged that routes 17A and 17B provide some service to these areas, the 17A bus stop at Oxford Street in Sanatorium is an approximately 30-minute walk from the communities. The 17B, although routing through River Bend and West Five communities provides limited service hours from Monday through Friday and no service on weekends or holidays, which is not adequately serviced staff of the River Bend and West Five communities where approximately 25% rely on these services. Due to the lack of service provided to these communities, we have found it challenging to keep and attract new staff to serve the growing businesses in River Bend, West Five and Warbler Woods, as well as Riverstone retirement, a 24/7 service provider to seniors and River Bend Gulf communities.

The minimal and irregular levels of service pose challenges to those who are dependent on transit to travel to and from their place of work. An expansion of LTC bus services to better services communities is extremely necessary and will not only assist with workforce shortages, but also in reducing reliance on vehicles as the primary mode of transportation, thereby promoting more green forms of transportation. We respectfully request that the committee consider expansion of LTC bus services to River Bend, West Five and Warbler Woods communities, as well as a review of service hours with respect to these existing routes. Thank you for your time and consideration of this request.

Okay, thank you. Looking to committee to see if you’d like a bio break and for length of time. Councilor Hopkins? If I could suggest 15 minutes for a break.

I know there’s still a number of speakers still to be had. It gives us a bit of time just to do what we need to do and grab something to eat and we can make it back. I’m up for other comments, but I would suggest 15. As chair, there’s a couple of things I would need to do.

So I would suggest maybe 20 or someone could chair in my stead as my vice chair is not physically here. And I think dinner tonight is sandwiches just for people’s information. So if you wanna move 15, that’s fine. Councilor Ferret, I don’t know if you were seconding that.

That would take like a 9% tax increase. Okay, so I’ve been moving in a second here for 20 minutes. Move by Councilor Hopkins, my Councilor Ferret. So we’re calling the question and then I’ll give, I guess, procedurally.

So anyone in chambers in the committee rooms? I would just ask that if someone’s led up in the microphone just to take note of who it is for ideally, it would be allowed to have their spot when we return from break. There is gonna be some room opening up in council chambers if you would like to come in here instead or ideally we can do some of the committee rooms as some are filling up just so you can be together. Okay, so calling the question on a bio break.

Just wanted to say, if you do wanna take a longer break, I don’t mind taking over the chair. Councillor Cuddy, Councillor McAllister. Councillor Lewis, Councillor Lewis. Those in the vote, motion carries.

13-0. Those are earlier. Councillor, 650. Can you hold everything down?

They weren’t even talk about all the supporters of the police budget by proxy. They’ve already said, if they don’t vote it through it goes to arbitration. So we’re reluctant supporters of the police budget. So what has to be done now is hold the leadership of this city to account to the promises that the police are making us.

I don’t wanna see people smoking meth in the doorways of our businesses anymore. Yeah, so is that the change? I know, why not tell, but I think people feel like that doesn’t have to pay them back, doesn’t have to pay. With the budget pattern, I mean, to me, other people.

And that’s the way we don’t have the ones to have those issues. Well, that’s what they’re saying. They want it, they want it to be directed. But they also need to act our goal.

Yeah, we need some of the— I don’t want it to be in the house. Yeah. Yeah, just marketing. I need you to talk to me.

I need you to talk to me. Yeah, just have to talk to that person. I’m a major client. They talked about it to the medical professionals.

I can’t even stop this person. No, but they, no, it’s because they took it out of the least budget. Yeah. Yeah.

And it’s good for doctors. And how are we gonna start? Yeah. By the way, workers.

I did hand this guy. I’m gonna give you some cream. Even if we take money from the guys, there’s no one who can hire. Oh, because, well, I’m just saying in Toronto, they did it.

Oh, Toronto, yeah, they also reduce the taxes for multi-resident shutdowns. So again, they gave in to developers. Oh, okay. Because they’re only getting the resources and taxes, whereas everybody else is going on.

But I think they were trying to bring that, and I don’t know enough about it, but you know, about eight years ago, and we did the same work at the family resident chain. Oh, wait. Yeah. He brought it back.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, I didn’t do it again. So, what they’re saying is they’re looking to, they’re looking to redistribute the funds.

Yeah. So, so what happens is the nonprofits and all my workers come first. We can all just settle back in. We’re about to get started.

Okay, Councilor’s online. I’m just gonna do a check, just to visually see that you’re there. I see Councilor Hillier looking to see if Councilor Layman and Vermeergen, okay, pause with us, and just looking to see if Councilor Layman’s there. Perfect, Councilor Layman’s with us.

Okay, so I’m told that YouTube is streaming. We’re good. There are three Councilor colleagues are all online. Looking to committee room one to see if there’s a speaker.

Okay, we’re just condensing some committee rooms. I have a speaker in the gallery on the top right microphone, and then I’m gonna go online to see if Mr. David Turner is with us. So welcome to state your name.

David, D-A-V-I-D, Friesen, F-R-I-E-S-E-N. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is David Friesen. I am a homeowner and live in ward six.

I’ve been in London for 37 years, and being a small business owner for 21 years. Today, I want to share some of my concerns about the state of safety in our city. London does not feel as safe as it was years ago. Seems like every week I hear more about shootings, break-ins, and car thefts.

Londoners are afraid to go downtown to eat in a restaurant, go to the theater, or go shopping on Richmond Row, where my flower shop is. People living in downtown are afraid to go out at night. Business like mine are forced to deal with broken windows, evangelism, graffiti, which drives costs up and deters my customers. Even the mayor has acknowledged we do have a downtown safety problem.

These crimes are having a very negative impact on residents, businesses, and visitors to our city. Even worse, sometimes it takes days for an officer to show up and take an statement. This is completely unacceptable. People are tired of the crime, and they want things to change.

Right now, council has a chance to ensure our police service finally catches up and cuts the resources they need to deal with the crimes and keeping businesses and Londoners safe. Let’s hire more officers to patrol every part of the city. Let’s expand the wonderful foot patrol unit. Councillors, please don’t let London fall further behind past this budget.

And let’s continue to build a city we can all be proud of. Thank you. Okay, just clerks do not see Mr. David Turner on landless time, so I’m going to go to the speaker on the bottom of this gallery.

Just state your name and welcome. Hi, I’m Heather D. Chapman, and I am a member of the London downtown Condominium Advocacy Group. I’m here today to give my support for the full police budget.

I would like to address the data issue here. A lot of people are getting up on the stand and giving their opinion that the data doesn’t support the budget ask, and I don’t think that we’ve had the infrastructure in place for the community to properly report the amount of crimes that are happening in the city. When I go on to any of the city of London crime maps, I don’t see that the actual crime rate is reflected there. And so I would like to debunk that.

The other thing I would like to address here is that as our society is getting more and more dangerous as we have more of the world events impacting how people react to one another, whether they’re citizens who have family in other countries who are trying to do a peaceful kind of a protest in the park, and then they get other people going to these rallies who are drinking the Kool-Aid on these websites where they get everybody all hyped up and matted each other. And I go to some of these, and I’m not one of these people who can tell whether or not the guy standing next to me is one of these guys that’s gonna start a big riot or not, but the police do. And I think that we really have to support a lot of the infrastructure and a lot of the communications and a lot of the equipment that the police need out there in the field to make us come to realize that we’re a big city and we are gonna have big city problems. Lots of times when we are on the downtown streets and when we’re talking to our neighbors, or even when we’re out having a meal or a coffee with somebody, they will tell us.

Well, you know, we had seasons tickets to the Grand Theatre. We used to come into London. We used to have dinner. We used to go to the theater.

And that was a really nice time for us now because we don’t think that it’s safe downtown. We have changed our season tickets. We come to less matinees. We go to the matinee.

We turn around and we go home. So there’s lost business for restaurants. There’s a whole nice recreational outing for that person who wants to come to our city and support our economy. And it’s gone because they’re afraid to come to our city.

And we really have to give the police credit for having done as good a job as they’ve done with such a little amount of communications, infrastructure, and just a lack of sheer numbers to have to deal with the number of cases that they just can’t get to. I hear this from my neighbors all of the time that they’ve been waiting for somebody to come from the city of London police to address a break in entry or somebody who’s come to their doorstep and has tried to get in. And they’re waiting two or three days. Well, it’s not because the police don’t want to come.

It’s not because they’re neglectful. They’re just aren’t the numbers. So we really have to step up our game. If we want to be the big, prosperous city that we think that we are and that we’re trying to build all these houses for, we have to have the supply of police and we have to have people feeling that it’s a safe place to be.

We can’t be reacting after the fact. So I think this new police chief has done a good job so far. He’s actually gone out into the community. He’s engaged with them.

He’s reacted to the people at Masonville Mall who said that their customers are being threatened, that they’re being robbed blind and they don’t think that they can hang on lots of times. And so he’s actually gone up there and made a police presence visible to them. He’s also gone to the Ontario government and gotten $300,000 from the provincial coffers for supporting disadvantaged street kids so that they don’t go farther down the lane. Thank you, that’s your five minutes.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Looking online to Zoom to Richard, just making sure that you can, perfect, we can see you if you’re unmuted. So welcome and you have up to five minutes.

Thank you, hello council members. My name is Richard Bloomfield and based on watching the budget deliberations, I would like to share three points regarding the police budget as well as express support for business cases P15 and P16. Number one, there are plenty of good questions that have not been asked or answered, which therefore does not warrant the scale of investment currently proposed. Number two, in general, we do have a history of underinvestment in the city due to tax reasons in the past.

And if there is a concern about affordability for homeowners on fixed incomes, then the police budget is one of the very few places where reductions can happen without losing direct support to someone’s life. And number three, it is prudent for this council to give police leadership the opportunity to reconsider their approach to this budget after hearing overwhelming community feedback. On point number one, we’ve heard a number of points tonight. We know the police received $4 million in 2023 from the assessment growth to hire new officers.

Did this hiring happen? What are the results? Are the 97 proposed in the budget on top of this? Is there a road map to achieving the volume of hiring?

And what is the timeline? Police foundation and Romans are down. It’s not even clear that this is possible. It’s not a failure of the police to not ask these questions.

That failure rests on this council and the police board, which Londoners have entrusted to ask these questions. The police have access to request additional funding every year during assessment growth and annual budget review if there is evidence of success and need. On point number two, obviously municipalities are burdened with issues that do require additional provincial and federal support and advocacy to those levels of government has worked and has to continue especially for appropriate social assistance rates, which have produced many of the current problems that we face. However, it does not make sense to me to hear this council argue that they don’t want to burden the tax base because certain social services should be provincial problems.

When the province is taxing the same population in a more regressive way through sales tax boards, agencies, commissions, like the transit and library have been told, tighten your budget, seek other funding, come back with the better plan. The police are just as capable of seeking out alternative funding and have said as much to this body. We have heard that you need both police and social services so we should not pit them against each other than why protect 100% of the police ask while rejecting many of the additional urgently needed social service requests. This council can demonstrate that the police are subject to the same budget scrutiny that others are.

If a difference of a tax hike between 8.7 and 8.8% is enough to reject support for other emergency social services, let me suggest offsetting that with a mere 5% reduction to the increase of the current police budget. That is less than a 1% cut to the entire budget. So for those who would like to be fiscally conservative, you can do this without treating the police budget as untouchable. And number three, that a police budget decision could theoretically be overturned.

Outside of this body is not something worth substantiating. Council should make the best decision they can for our community and leave it there. If police leadership is serious about earning community trust and that every dollar is a priority to staffing, then there should be no concern at all. That they would prioritize light armored vehicles, EVE cars, training facilities ahead of staffing needs if they face a budget reduction.

If not, then council have reason to increase scrutiny in the future. In conclusion, Londoners across the political spectrum are frustrated. And so I ask, despite your political differences, that council, please, of course, correct. Consider at least reducing the increase.

30 seconds, please budget by 5% to fund emergency social services desperately needed, such as P-15 and P-16, extreme clean and housing stability, as Christie spoke to so well earlier, which, if not funded, will all but certainly increase the number of community members who are unhoused. And frankly, it is hard to imagine that it’s less of a priority than a modest budget cut to the police budget. Thank you. Thank you going to committee room five next.

And then I’ll go to the top microphone on the left in the gallery. OK, so your microphone should be live. There was somebody at the mic in committee room five. They’ve walked away.

Yeah, they’re coming back. OK, perfect. I was just grabbing my sign. Thank you.

If you just state your name, and then just make sure we can hear you in the microphone. Where the microphone— I’m going to hear you perfectly. You’re great. Right, right, OK.

I came here today as, like, I guess, sort of trying to represent the last fleet in moments of Black History Month. And just I think we got a shout out for that quite yet. So like, hey, hey, I see you with the sign room three. Yeah, all right, respect.

But yo, anyway, I’m just glad to be here. But I think a very important part of Black History and the most progressive strides that we’ve made as a culture is letting ourselves be open to new cultures and new ways. And even methods of, I don’t know, poor people on the same wave, you know what I’m saying? Like, it’s a class unity thing first.

So we all get in the press. You know, cops protect private property over personal property, you know? And we can’t let that stand necessarily. We do.

But to this extent, all right, all right, all right. Hear me out. How many of y’all been on the bus? Like, I don’t know if we can get a full view of, like, council chambers right there.

But, like, if you all, like, ride the bus regularly, I’m just curious, because I feel like that’s a service where the real ones know it’s fucking the 19 still. But, like, the number 19 bus, the way that’s always late, the way that they could have had shift, this actual, you know, intersection of BRT and everything just moving forward is moving forward. But it’s moving backwards. We’re always gutting the system.

We’re always scraping the guts out from this bullshit. Here’s the thing. Y’all remember the ring road? That’s the thing, too.

That’s the thing, too. We could have had all these transit and public innovations right at our fingertips. And I was so missing. And I feel like this is a pretty pivotal point and a lot of pivotal income to be, like, you know what?

How about we assess this, represent the views in the community and actually make a decision that ain’t a waste of $673 million. Was that none of them? All right, that’s a big-ass number. I can’t add the high.

I don’t make that much money. But I feel like a lot of that could go to more beneficial services. And we could all just come up, you know? Class unity, Black unity, all that.

Thank you. And can I have just your first name or first and last if you wanna give it for the public record? No, I’m good. Personally, like, if you know, you know, but— Okay, thank you.

We’re out here. Going to the gallery top corner, please. First and foremost, I’d like to thank everybody for the hard work they do on the budget. We know it’s not a nice place to be.

My name is Darlene Boyce. Most people down there know me as Darcy. I’m a lifelong resident of London, 60 years in counting. I recently, members of this chamber have stated that the police budget will go through by force or by arbitration.

So I think that makes us all kind of reluctant supporters of the police budget. I think at that junction is when we need to start looking at holding the services, police and everything else that we fund to account. So at that point, I think in year two, three and four of our budget is where we have to start looking at the promises that are being made to us by the police and holding them to the account of making London a safer city. Because a lot of people, I know myself coming from Ward 4, there’s a lot of people in this city that don’t feel safe.

There’s a lot of things that go on in this city that are just unacceptable anymore. And I understand the plight of the social services and the homelessness and the drug addiction, but honestly, smoking meth in the doorway of our businesses is just not acceptable anymore. And if we are going to look at funding such a large police task, then those issues have to start being addressed. And we look to the horseshoe for the leadership of making the promises of the police come to fruition in our city and truly becoming the safer city that we’re being promised.

And in the years that come, I will be looking at the leadership of this chamber to be holding those budgets to account. Thank you, going to Committee Room 3 next. And then I will be going online for Caitlin. So Committee Room 3, please.

Can you hear me all right? Yeah, if you can just state your name, and then I’ll start your time. I don’t feel comfortable sharing my name. OK, we’ll just note it as unknown then.

So please proceed. Under R, I lived in London all my life. I was born at St. Joe’s Hospital.

And I want to show my support for right now with all those people speaking against the outrageous LPD as budgeting in request. I will be mentioning some things that will be upsetting to other sexual assault victims at their present. When I was 13, I was sexually assaulted by a classmate for over a year. I was followed home and cyber to attack for another year proceeding.

When I tried to request a restraining order, I was treated like another boring case in their day and blamed for what happened to me by your dispatcher. Your police sighed at me when I told them I was too scared to talk about what I had just been through, something I’ve only been able to begin to even start thinking about as of this year. When I was 15 years old, I was flashed in the aisle away by my house. When my mom called the police, the first question they asked me after my address wasn’t how it happened, or if I was hurt, an LPD officer asked me to describe what the flasher’s genitals looked like.

How would that help? Is that how the LPD identifies the people that they take in, looking at their genitals? When I said I didn’t want to think about it, she kept pushing me. I didn’t want to contact the police in the first place because I was afraid this situation would escalate because that’s all the police can do.

It was the only choice I could think of as a young girl and the only choice that many people have. And now as a trans youth, I know that I’m not protected by any of you. Countless officers in the LPD are facing sexual assault allegations at the moment. And instead of being fired or charged, they’re being put on paid leave, vacations.

They’re paying to cover up their countless crimes. This is where your $673 million request will be going. I’m now 20 years old. In my whole 20 years of living in London, I’ve only seen a houselessness issue in our city rise.

People being evicted from tents in the forest who have nowhere left to go. No programs to get help from because they’re underfunded and overcrowded. You should be horrified and disgusted by the thought of people being evicted from tents and forests. I want you to think about the countless amount of houseless children’s and adults facing sexual assault and rape.

Being abused by the same officers that are requesting $673 billion for their violent weapons, armored cars, and their donut fund. If you live in London and you go outside, you have seen it. You’ve seen the way the houseless folks in our city are treated by the LPD. Many of London’s citizens, especially people of color and indigenous people, are only a few rent payments away from ending up on the streets.

One of you ever seen a cop help a person on the street. I’ve lived here for 20 years and I’ve only seen cops target and degrade and hurt them. I have seen outside of St. Joseph’s Cafe, a man passed out on the ground from opioid overdose.

Two cops approached him, asked if he was awake, and when he didn’t answer, they walked away. A member of the London Interim Community Health Center came out and gave him medication in his nose and called an ambulance. This was two years ago and clearly nothing has changed. When I worked at the Mission Arcade Kitchen, I saw firsthand how underfunded they were, given debt to cans that they were asked to make food with and which we had to throw away.

I’m not sure if any of the city council members have a safe food handling certificate and I have my doubts. But if you do, then you can understand botulism and how it can kill people. Some people here have complained about crime, but they don’t think about what leads to it. The criminals that you speak of are cold and starving.

They have children who are hungry and freezing, babies who are, babies and themselves to feed. They wouldn’t be stealing if it wasn’t their very last option. I’m not going to ask you to imagine if it was you because you don’t need to imagine anything. It’s happening right in front of you.

Stop imagining and stop complaining about homeless people if you’re not willing to do anything to prevent it. You don’t want it to change. You want something to be angry and complain about. Don’t act like you care about the people on the street if you’re not willing to fund the programs that will help them.

Don’t act like you care about sexual assault victims if you’re willing to pay for their cover up, the cover up of the people abusing them. Don’t act like you care about the people of color and indigenous folks in our city if you’re willing to ignore the abuse and violence that they face that is perpetrated by our police. I believe in prevention. I believe in a better London where the people on the street are given help and sympathy.

I believe in a London without homeless people because it’s prevented and it stays that way. This is achievable, provided you support housing initiatives. 20 seconds. - To supply programs, safe injection sites, accessible education and transit.

When you’re hurting, the police will not help you. It has been proven time and time again. As a poor person who’s already hardly able to afford rent or pay for a bus pass to keep a job, there are many more pain points that I have but cannot bring up for time, some of which my friends here have already mentioned. Thank you, that’s your five minutes.

And thank you for sharing such a personal story, R. Hey, going online to Caitlin, you can put your, perfect, you don’t need to use your camera for anyone joining us online, but you’re welcome to and you seem to be unmuted. So you have up to five minutes and welcome. Thank you.

And thank you for the bravery of the previous speaker and the several others that have shared lived experiences of LPS harm. I echo my neighbors in demanding the council reject the London police services budget and instead allocate funds towards evidence-based health and community services that are proven to actually reduce crime and increase well-being, such as our public libraries, arts and culture, climate initiatives, mental health, harm reduction and addiction supports, affordable housing and accessible costs of living. I am extremely alarmed by the council’s apparent disregard for the documented ineffective and harmful behavior of several London police officers. Ongoing occurrences of misconduct, particularly targeting those that need the most help, as well as violent and blatant anti-black and anti-indigenous racism ought to matter to you and to budget considerations, especially as a council who claims to be committed to anti-racism and reconciliation.

A long reputation of corruption, delayed response or even denial in sexual assault cases, overuse of force even causing death and submitting a budget request with skewed statistics should at the very least give you all pause. How are we meant to interpret our mayor’s self-proclaimed unequivocal support for this budget request? Right now it’s reading as approval and reward of harm. Your willingness to financially support this behavior communicates that you shrug away the rampant racism discrimination, misogyny and bigotry displayed by this police force.

We punish violent police with paid leave. Document assaults not only take place on our city streets against our most vulnerable and marginalized folks, they also happen within police custody, with no checks and balances, because their institutional culture is so psychologically unsafe that fellow officers would risk their own safety if they speak out. Police misconduct with impunity or paid leave is unacceptable. This crime needs to be reduced.

The incompetence of LPS as an institution stems not from a lack of resources, but from a lack of accountability and a failure of the city to invest instead in alternative models of intervention. LPS has an increase in gap in education and skills in trauma informed response and nonviolent intervention. There is a total absence of critical thinking and awareness of the role of police in perpetuating crime and systemic injustice. Why wouldn’t we prioritize funding the services that can offer adequate prevention and can effectively and safely deescalate and get folks access to the care they need so we can address the root causes of suffering and the root causes of crime?

At its most basic level, we know that traditional policing methods of intimidation, violence and control serve to evoke fear. They breed distrust, cause further harm and exacerbate social crisis. They certainly do not reduce crime as proven in the plethora of research. We need reform.

Adding more of these status quo officers to our streets with more weaponry and continued freedom to perpetuate harm does not make me feel more safe, protected, nor served. Less than a year ago, London was named Canada’s unhappiest city. We are not okay. We’re grappling with financial distress, health and housing crises, discrimination and underfunded community support services.

We’re struggling, especially amidst global emergencies like the pandemic, climate change and currently watching the genocide of Palestinians while being told it isn’t happening. Even while some of our own Londoners are trapped or have family in Gaza. Allocate funds to bring those families home. The unequivocal support of a harmfully ignorant police force sounds a lot like no red lines for a genocidal military.

The term dystopia is no longer a distant concept but a harsh reality reflected in part by militarizing our cities through swelled police power. Do not dismiss the voices of those calling for change. There is desperation here. As folks continue to struggle, protests and expressions of dissent will continue to grow.

We know it’s no coincidence that we’re seeing more intimidation tactics and weaponry and increased misuse of force against peaceful protesters with continued disproportionate harm for those with equity deserving identities. Who are you protecting with drones and armored vehicles? 30 seconds. - What are we preparing for?

The egregious budget LPS has proposed will not lead to increased safety. It will lead to increased desperation that we cannot afford. That is dangerous for everyone. If you approve this LPS budget as submitted, you will put us all at risk.

We do not need more fear, we need more support. Thank you and free Palestine. Thank you and going to the gallery top bottom on this side, please. Good evening.

Mayor Morgan, Budget Chair, Palosa, members of council. My name is Brendan Samuels and I’m speaking today as a resident of Ward 4. I wanna begin by thanking council and staff for all your work on this budget. I appreciate the space you are making to hear community concerns.

I commend your advocacy on behalf of your constituents within this budget but also to higher levels of government for funding reform. I also wanna thank everybody in the gallery and online. Personally, what makes me feel safer in our city is when the public is informed, engaged, and they show up to care for each other. In the added agenda, you will find a submission for me under item BA.

This submission and what I wanna talk about today briefly are not addressing what I hope to see funded through this budget. Rather, my focus is to provide suggestions of potential improvements to future iterations of London’s budget making process. Aimed at reducing barriers to public engagement. As we near the end of this multi-year budget cycle, I reflected on my experiences participating, facilitating community outreach, and having discussions with some of you.

From my point of view, the budget was made more challenging. By the way, it was communicated. I don’t mean to criticize staff or members of council as I recognize you’ve done good work. However, I don’t believe this budget was quite as accessible, transparent, or objective as members of the community would have liked for it to be.

While there were wonderful initiatives in the community to facilitate engagement, including many information sessions and budget translation services, certain barriers made the budget harder for non-expert folks like myself to access and understand. I suspect that engagement with the budget became more confusing and polarized because of misunderstanding. In my submission, you will find a short list of suggestions with an invitation to pick up and discuss any of them later whenever is convenient. Maybe some of this information will be helpful for staff in planning out their work on future budgets.

In the interest of time, I’m gonna briefly summarize just a couple of these items. It is really important to consider how data is presented. Components of the draft budget are indeed available in a spreadsheet from the city’s open data portal. However, despite having done a bunch of research into this budget through the provided PDF document, I only found out about that spreadsheet in the portal recently.

It’s not mentioned anywhere on the Get Involved page or in the budget that you can download the data. Access to these data matter. It makes it easier for the public to engage with the budget. Those spreadsheets enable people to generate graphs, which is important for accessibility because that allows you to visually compare large abstract quantities.

A second item is that information about how external sources of funding are reflected in the business cases could be presented in a standardized format. It’d be helpful to know for instance whether funding is time sensitive, if it is dedicated to specific projects or it could be redistributed, providing a breakdown of external funding streams as an appendix might be useful. Similarly, budget items that are mandatory, legislatively required, or determined through a process external to the budget itself, such as through a collective agreement, should be clearly labeled as such. This can help the public to distinguish between the wants and the needs and to understand the restrictions that council faces when considering adjustments.

A glossary section with definitions and high level explanations of terms used in the budget would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps the budget communication can be reviewed and advanced by a non-expert group to flag anything that’s unclear. Campaigning surrounding this budget by interested parties raises some concerns about public opinion being manipulated by aggressive and particularly fear-based marketing and framing. Given the complexity of the budget, many Londoners depend on access to information provided by external parties to inform their own advocacy.

Perhaps the city would benefit from a policy or a guideline that applies to these third party activities. Unlike many other cities, London lacks a public lobbying registry. Consequently, it is impossible for the public to access information about which interest groups have met privately with members of council to discuss the budget. In the interest of transparency, it may be prudent for members of future budget committees to keep records of their engagements with such groups.

Last time the idea of a lobbyist registry was raised in October, it was described as a solution in search of a problem. I look forward to this position being revisited in the future. Finally, the process of council receiving delegations from representatives of commissions, agencies, and community groups during the budget debates seemed a bit disjointed, stressful, and it did not allow for time for new information to be considered before voting occurred. I would suggest that delegations like these should take place at standing committee meetings prior to budget debate sessions.

This format could be applied to annual budget updates as well. In conclusion, I hope you will join me in reflecting on your experiences of this budget process and consider how stewardship of the budget as an institution can make this process more transparent, equitable, and accessible in the future. I want to, again, thank you all for your time and for your work on this budget. Thank you for being with us, and you always time yourself so precisely.

I’m going to committee room five, and then I will be going online to Becca, who’s joining us virtually. So your name and committee room five, if you’re fine, and then your time will commence. Yeah, okay, perfect, thank you. Okay, so my name is Connor Tustian.

I am a student at Western University, and I am studying history. In addition to that, I am proud to be an occasional volunteer for the local forest city food, not bombs, who put in the real work to provide for those at the very bottom of society. I personally have been a victim of criminal activity as my house was robbed just last year over winter break. I would like to live in a world where people don’t have to depend on robbery and on criminal activity to live and live comfortably.

I do not wish my robber to be brutalized or put in a prison because that won’t fix anything. Criminality exists as a consequence of poverty, and an increase in the police budget of any kind, let alone the increase that is proposed, won’t solve poverty, it will simply criminalize it. An increase in the police budget will simply make existence of the “houseless” and marginalized society more dangerous. It will not end the houselessness but further brutalize and displace those who have nowhere else to go.

My fellow friends who stand against this police budget have already stated where this money could go, literally anywhere else. Affordable housing, better rent control, environmental protection, libraries, museums, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The cops do not need it. The community does.

Thank you and free Palestine. Amen. Thank you. Back up.

Kate, we can see you and we should be able to hear you. Again, I wanted to make a note. I really hope the counselors didn’t gloss over the man who has the missing son. You all have social networks and followings, so you all have the ability to help him.

But okay, to begin. I’m here to urge counselors to support further amendments to fund business case P59 to help the public library find savings in its budget through improvements in its security system. I originally planned to share some personal stories of how the library has been an integral part of basically every stage of my life as a way of conveying how the library libraries are used every single day by people significantly less privileged than those on the council. But after hearing some of the comments of a couple of counselors at the last budget meeting about how insignificant they find individual stories, I won’t waste your time with mine.

What I will do is address the thoughtless discriminatory and inconsiderate comments made by those counselors regarding the potential closures of underperforming branches. One counselor commented that older branches should be shut down due to underperformance because we should be treating all aspects of our community like a business. To that, I would like to remind this counselor that libraries have never and will never be a profiting body. The moment their priorities switch in that direction, they will simply not be public libraries anymore.

It just isn’t logical to view libraries as something that needs to be, that needs to provide a return on investment the way businesses do. Libraries are about community, not commodity. What’s more, of course, some branches are, of course, some branches are chronically underperforming. They’ve been chronically underfunded, creating a negative feedback loop.

It’s therefore rather ironic and short-sighted to suggest shutting down branches when the reason they’re underperforming in the first place is because they don’t have enough funding to stay open for a full day. Another comment made by a counselor that needs to be addressed is the point that nostalgic memories made in old library branches can easily be replaced by making new memories at new locations like Bostwick and Stoney Creek. These suggestions clearly come from a place of blind privilege where access to private vehicles at any time has left some counselors unable to fathom the difficulty of traveling to either of those locations by public transit. The suggestion to simply travel to these other branches completely neglects the experience of impoverished and/or disabled learners in the areas of these underperforming branches.

How is a low-income person from Lambeth, for example, supposed to get to Bostwick Library? The only route that goes to Lambeth doesn’t run on weekends or between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. So if a resident wants to attend the library at those times or on the weekends they have to walk 30 minutes to get to the nearest Bostwick Have you ever considered what a 30-minute or even just a 10-minute excursion is like when someone is walking through freezing rain?

There are no sidewalks and they’re struggling with some form of disability. I’m sure many counselors will think someone should just use the pair of transit but even if that system improves enough for that to be a reasonable option, you’re still neglecting that the Bost system costs money to take. How is someone living on Ontario disability supposed to afford the $3 to get to the library when they can’t afford their monthly grocery bill? It is a serious accessibility and equity issue when the most vulnerable populations can’t access fundamental community resources like a library because the privileged members of their local council have failed to conceptualize accessibility issues for populations outside of their own demographic.

Finally, I want to address the comment that the library is getting the biggest budget increase that they’ve ever had since compared to past budgets. This comment completely neglects the fact that basically all of that increase is absorbed by the inflated costs faced by the library as everything from rent to hydro to basic office supplies has spiked in recent years. The library hasn’t asked for anything more than what they need. On the contrary, they actually intentionally reduced their ask sizeably and yet the council still rejected the majority of that reduced ask through P69 in the last meeting.

Thus, I am asking councilors to consider funding P59 because it is the last remaining business case for the library that hasn’t been given consideration and it promises to help the library find savings in their future budgets. Considering the unexpected expenses the library has recently faced associated with recovering from their cyber attack in December combined with the cuts within the mayor’s budget, every little place things can be found will be valuable to the library board as they try to rework their budgets for future years. So for councilors concerned about where to find funding for P59, as you’ve heard from many other people, I agree that the police budget has contributed far too much to our ballooning tax rate. We as citizens do not agree with the amount of money you are giving them.

The library should have to find more areas for savings in its base budget requests, despite experiencing the same or worse chronic underfunding as the police department, then why shouldn’t the police department also have to find areas for further savings too? The library does more for our community and many people sense of safety than any armed police vehicle or training facility ever could. It is clear from past meetings that councilors have ideas as to where some of these savings can be found. So stop asking the deputy chief if he’s willing to take cuts and simply tell him to find savings the same way you told the CEO of the library.

Thank you. Thank you Becca. Okay, I’m going to go to the gallery top corner please if you just state your name and then you have up to five minutes. Hi there.

I’m Justin, thank you for the opportunity to give input on the budget. I grew up in Old North and I’m currently in Oak Ridge. I’m here to support the calls made by many other Londoners asking for the city to allocate more funding towards support for housing, mental health and addiction services rather than the massive police spending increase that has been proposed. Londoners who are unhoused suffer from mental health challenges and/or addiction need more support and resources.

We also need lots of affordable housing in part to help those who are struggling to get and remain housed. We also desperately need more non-market housing such as co-ops to keep housing affordable for the long term. On the topic of housing I’d like to quickly add a piece that hasn’t been explored yet tonight. I want to highlight one reason the housing situation in this city is so dire and that is the man who seems like he will not rest until his name is on every building in this city.

I’m talking of course about Farhe. I don’t know what’s bigger, his ego or the bank accounts of the Saudis that are allegedly bankrolling him. This man owns about half of all vacant buildings in the downtown area. If you want to hike the budget why doesn’t council use increased vacant property taxes to tax Farhe and rectify his atrocious impact on the city and so that all Londoners can be taxed less.

Also zoning enforcement can help produce the amount of vacant buildings in London. These buildings such as Farhe’s massive supply of vacant buildings can and should be used for people to live in to work in and to use in other ways. Farhe’s business practices are arguably an unfair nuisance that actively harms the city and its residents by worsening the housing crisis and hollowing out our downtown. Why should anyone live in a tent when we could be improving the situation in more ambitious ways.

So I hope council will see the mistake in the proposed budget and change accordingly to prioritize programs needed to give support to the unhoused and the otherwise struggling and increased housing and building stock. We need to see more ambition, compassion and effective approaches to solving our city’s challenges and to help our neighbors thrive. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you going to committee room five.

Okay just waiting for your mic to go live. Okay it should be good to go if you just want to state a name for the record and then I will start your time at up to five minutes and welcome. There my name is Trent here I am. I’m here to like many here today to speak up against the police budget.

There’s a name I want the council to remember when they consider this new budget. That name is Wesley Reeves. He’s one of the dozens cops in the last decade that come up. Oh sorry he’s one of the dozens of cops names that come up from the last decade if you google London Ontario pay post suspended officer for years.

Our council might already remember Wesley as he was a cop who spent over a third of his career on continuous pay suspension. The police of this town have wasted the undisclosed amount of dollars in the last few years paying people who do not work for them. In any other industry this would cause outrage. If the school is doing this or the hospital is doing this you would throw a fit.

The police as a public service cannot be held to a different standard. Now paying the salaries to the people who do not work for them is not the only reason the London police want a budget increase. They’re asking for extra funding for more tasers despite the fact that crime in London is decreasing. According to stats Canada crime in London is down roughly 10 percent.

Violent crime down 15 and non violent crime down 7. This of course is not appraised to cops. The London police are aware that crime is dropping so why are they asking for more money for more weapons. If cops did not need tasers beforehand they do not need them now.

Especially since when they do use tasers it’s majority against black and indigenous peoples. The London police have a well-known reputation of being extremely violent towards people of color. As crime is going down especially violent crime they now have the audacity to ask for more weapons. Weapons that they use mostly against people of color.

Sorry I’m out of breath. Continuing on the list of insane things to ask for when crime is going down. The London police are asking for another lightly armored vehicle. Meanwhile they already don’t use the two that they have.

For any council members wondering why this is such a colossal waste of money let me appeal to you. If you have a kid and that kid has a Barbie dream house and doesn’t use it you wouldn’t buy them a second one. If that kid had two Barbie dream houses and didn’t use it you sure as hell would not give them a third one and yet the London police are asking for a third lightly armored vehicle when they don’t even use the first two. Oh I believe the note.

In situation that occurs in London where the police need military weapons and vehicles we should not be relying on the police. They are so under trained that this is above their pay grade. If this ever was to occur that they would need an L.A.V. we should not be relying on the police we should be going to the actual military but that’s the thing though that would never occur.

There’s no reason for London to need military grade weapons and yet they have two of them already. If the police need money so badly they need to do an eternal audit. Why should our tax dollars be going to an organization that waste them on people or sorry waste them on paying people who do not work for them. They got waste them on military vehicles that they don’t use and waste them on weapons that they only use against indigenous black people.

As I wrap up I understand that the counselors here have pitched an idea about removing some of the proposed police budget and allocating it towards social aid services. I applaud those who have backed this idea. I urge the council to say no to this budget increase. The London police do not deserve more money when they can’t even properly use the funding they have.

A reallocation of the proposed budget so towards social aid affordable housing and education will lower crime in London and it will also boost the economy in our city. If the London police truly cared about lowering crime instead of aligning their own pockets they would have proposed this already. However they only want to line their pockets. As a matter of fact the budget the London police want is too large for London to maintain in the long run.

A vast majority of it is going to items to only boost the London police ego and the ability to escalate peaceful situations into violent arrests once again usually gets people of color. The money should be going to social services affordable housing education in our libraries. Things that actually lower crime and help the city prosper. Thank you for your time.

Free Palestine. Thank you. Looking to see if the speaker is ready in the chambers up top here on the side. Yep it’d be you.

And then after that I will go to committee room three. My name is Ann and we have a last room. At the last four year budget we were told that our property taxes had to go up substantially because we needed the money for hubs and and and and homeless and housing and now I feel all that’s been abandoned in this budget and I feel like you’ve squandered my money. I can’t afford an 8.7 tax hike.

I can’t afford it next year either and if the tax hikes go up to 33% I could lose my house. I also know there’s lots and lots of people like me in the city. They can’t afford 33% tax hike in four years and that’s not going to and people aren’t going to let move here. If you think the city is going to be growing exponentially like it did over Colvin that’s not going to happen because people aren’t going to move to a city that has 33% tax hike in four years.

I live off of Richmond Road. I don’t feel unsafe. I don’t call the police if someone breaks into my car because I left my door open that’s not a police matter. I don’t call the police if someone is stolen by mail.

I don’t always call the police because there’s nothing they can do. I recently had a car towed off my property that ended up being stolen. I did call the police. They basically just shrugged their shoulders.

It’s just like I think people have an aspect a high unrealistic expectation of what the police can do for them when in fact they can take measures themselves to to take care of their own house. I don’t support this police budget. I think it’s a greedy budget. I think the police and members of council have shown ill well to Londoners.

Some counselors just won’t talk about the debate. They vote against motions that want to redirect some of that money to other service areas. They rejected in silence. There’s been no debate and I find that rude.

I think that people have been here hours trying to talk to you and you just respond in dead silence. I don’t appreciate that and I don’t want my money squandered just because the police is the new flavor in this budget. You have to deal with homelessness going through many many years. It’s a chronic systematic problem.

You don’t get to switch it out after four years because you have a new police chief and I can’t afford a 33 tax height percent tax height and most people can’t except for the mayor who is on the CBC last week and a call and show and you can correct me if I’m wrong but I think the last thing you said on that show is that you can afford the tax height but then you’re not on a fixed income. I know that you didn’t mean it but you sounded cruel and indifferent and I think that you can’t hold the police to account. You can’t follow up on the police budget to make sure those promises are coming through because you can’t even ask them to go back and find savings. So I’m sure Londoners do not begrudge increasing the police budget.

If they want to hire more police, that’s fine. If they want to hire or get cameras, that’s fine. If they want to hire or get some tasers, that’s fine. But that’s not the majority of the police budget and it’s misleading to tell your constituents that unless they get 700 million dollars in four years, somehow they’re going to be unsafe.

That’s a lie and the vast majority of the police budget has nothing to do with hiring police, upgrading technology to make their job more efficient. Nobody would begrudge that but that’s not what it’s going on here and I think you need to be start misleading people. Bring down the police budget, not 5% bring it down late, 15% and lower the tax hike and just be realistic because 33% tax hike isn’t going to fly in this city. You’re going to bankrupt people.

Thank you. Thank you. I will go to committee room three next and then I will go online for Meegan Walker. So committee room three, just waiting for your, okay, your microphone should be live if you just state your name and then I will start your time and welcome.

I’d rather not say my name. Thank you. Okay, you’ll just be on no one in the ledger then proceed. I do want to say I would begrudge the tasers and I do and I do begrudge increased policing.

But anyway, so we supposedly live in a facts over feelings society. That’s what people want. They’re talking about facts over feelings. So why are people ignoring the facts simply because they feel loyal to an entity that doesn’t give a shit about them?

Sorry, I’m just going to have to come, pray, pause your time. Just for everyone, no profanity. People are also streaming at home with kids and everything. So I know we’re passionate about some things but just please watch our language.

Push lead. I apologize to the children. If we do want to talk about feelings though, it is insulting to say that this is what the London community wants. Not enough data or feedback has been conducted for us to say that this is what the London community wants.

On housed people, disabled people, queer people, racialized people, poor and working class people are not served by an increased police budget. Only the protection of private property is and maybe a minority affluent population. Speaking to what one of the police board members shared who shouldn’t have been allowed to speak as they are not a member of the public, they said that this was the most thorough process they’ve ever conducted. And I just want to say if that is true, I am concerned every single point in that budget can be debunked.

The research is there, the stats are there and I’m not going to go all over all of them again because you should be thinking critically about this and you should be able to do that research on your own and many people have laid it out already. But the LPS just have not provided adequate justification for tasers, another light armored vehicle, a training center or drones. Here is some stats though, which someone else pointed out was that London was ranked the unhappiest city in Canada. Why?

What could have caused this? Is it because we’re so upset that another LPS officer isn’t on the sunshine list? Or maybe it’s the looming threat of poverty and houselessness. Maybe it’s the feeling that the system we live under doesn’t care about us.

The society that we live in is criminogenic. This means that the conditions we live under encourage and produce crime. Increasing policing is not going to solve this issue. It’s also an insult for the LPS to talk about EDI and anti-racism and then also slander racialized people speaking out against the police budget.

Do you want the people in the city to thrive? If you truly want to reduce crime, you need to invest in community care. Our own housed people are taking refuge in libraries. It is shameful that they are being left on the streets and have to find shelter because we also criminalize their houselessness.

By proving this increased budget, particularly budget lines for TASERS and LAV, a training facility, drones and TASERS starts at that and not reallocating that funding to our transit, libraries, housing, arts and culture, you are telling us directly that you don’t care about us and we don’t want to back a council that doesn’t care about us. My trust is not in the police and especially not in a police force to incompetence to come up with a reasonable budget. Why should we trust a police force that’s intimidating our own city council? Are we just going to continually let them bully us into giving them more money?

Our city won’t be safer by beefing up the LPS even more than they already are. I implore you to listen to the voices that people who are speaking to you today and I know this is annoying and I know we’re dragging it on but we can get a lot more annoying. We’re not going away. If you approve this budget, we will continually advocate and we will advocate year after year after year.

This fight isn’t over. Thank you. Thank you. Just as Miss Walker comes on screen, what committee rooms have joined us in chambers if you want to just you can hang on to your signs if you want or you have the ledge in front of you if the extra seating if you want to take up that space feel free.

Hey Miss Walker, we can see you. Your audio should be good. Welcome and you have up to five minutes. Thank you very much Madam Chair Mayor Morgan and members of London City Council.

I am the vice chair of the London Police Services Board. The London Police budget before you was developed after the board held its largest community engagement in history. More than 300 community groups and leaders from all levels of government were consulted, including city councilors and council candidates. Among those who participated was London’s ward to Councillor who asked us to bring back the core unit, streamline domestic violence and address street racing long response times and the lack of traffic enforcement.

The budget does that. The London West MPP expressed her concern about the well-being of officers whose workloads have increased significantly. She asked us to improve response times and provide stable finding to support the core unit. The budget does that.

We heard from London’s ward nine Councillor who told us the streets in her ward were unsafe. There was too much cut through traffic and speeding and there was an increase in vehicle break-ins. She told us her constituents had a heightened sense of not feeling secure. This budget addresses all of the Councillors concerns.

Other community members asked for more funding to support the human trafficking and domestic violence units. That too is included in the budget. For many years in my role as a woman’s advocate, I have asked police to collect enough evidence from domestic violence crimes to ensure conviction without relying upon a woman’s testimony. Many women are fearful to face their abusers in court.

The outcome of doing so may result in women being seriously injured or killed. Women are being killed in our city and communities across this country. The budget before you addresses this through the use of body worn cameras, body worn cameras, make it possible for police to take accurate statements, collect evidence of injuries and other pertinent evidence on their cameras. This will decrease the potential, sorry, decrease and potentially eliminate the need for an abused woman to testify.

It’s a big leap forward towards helping women seek justice without having to face their abusers. The new service delivery model outlined in the board’s proposed budget includes the provision of specialized domestic violence training to front line officers, allowing those officers to provide 24 hour specialized responses to victims of domestic violence. It highlights collaboration by providing training tools and the resources needed to support the city and its boards and commissions to recognize sorry, to recognize, address and prevent domestic violence assaults, sexual exploitation and trafficking. The model increases the number of officers available to help victims of domestic violence and is consistent with the city’s strategic direction to create a safe London for women.

There is no question that a cut to the police budget will negatively impact on our communities and the residents who continue to ask for a safer city. Thank you for holding this public consultation. Thank you for being with us tonight. I’m going to go back in the gallery to the top microphone.

We do have your correspondence but if you just state your name and then you’ll have your five minutes. I’m going to take up my mask because sorry, just one second, just one second, Councillor. Thank you and through you. I just want to make a point about decorum.

I do think that we have people that are speaking and we have people holding up signs saying they don’t have a right to speak. This is a public participation meeting. Everyone has a right to speak at this meeting. I think it’s important that we value that as a group collectively, no matter where we sit, whether we’re online or we’re in a committee room right now.

I do ask that we try to hold people responsible for their decorum. Thank you. Yes, for those who didn’t see we had an issue in the committee room, their feet was stopped and it will resume when we get back to their room for speaking. Ms.

Prout, if you could start again, just state your name and I will restart your time. Thank you for your patience. Good night, everyone. Dr.

Prout, war 12. I want to thank you for allowing the public to provide input on this multi-year budget. However, I strongly suggest that the timing of this public participation budget meeting be changed for future budget deliberations so that it comes early on the process. In this manner, the public can genuinely feel heard and hopefully our words will be more influential.

In 2023, I observed that there were many calls for accountability from a council, from some members on council, for social service agencies, including some who made submissions to the homeless hubs process. In stark contrast, this world of multi-year public police budgeting is being run through with insufficient interrogation by council. I and others are greatly dissatisfied with the lack of supporting evidence provided by the LPS to justify future expenditures that will account for almost 60% of our tax hikes over the next four years. Dr.

Leslie Bicos has submitted an excellent summary of concerns of the harms unfettered increases in police budgets can cause and recommendations that should be strongly considered by council. If this tax hike passes without scrutiny, accountability and reduction of the police budget, there will be renters who may get more policing yes but less housing stability. One would expect that a city firmly committed to addressing homelessness would also focus on homeless prevention. Unfortunately, business cases P16, the housing stability bank expansion and P17 housing stability table and of course P15 extreme clean were not included in this budget.

I listened to the Craig Newtons program and chief made an afterthought of doing this what the city of Seattle is, which was successfully diverted 50 to 80% of all 911 calls that were of a social nature rather than a criminal nature to non-police response team. I also don’t see any proven strategies that have been used in the states to reduce violence and produce savings of seven dollars US for each dollar invested. Those were not in the police budget. Urban public libraries in Canada stepped up during the height of the pandemic to support communities.

A recent report on the performance of libraries during that period reported and I quote by providing critical supports, access to knowledge, culture, health, reconciliation, belonging and our democracy enabled and that enabled governments to meet the obligations and strengthen the common good. End quote. The London Public Library supported Londoners and this municipal government in its time of need. But now when the London Public Library really needs help, it won’t have sufficient funds to even fix the leaky roof at the Beacock Library.

The Canadian Urban Institute recommends that we treat libraries as critical urban infrastructure and give them the funding to relieve operational pressures. You cannot police your way to a better democracy, but you can enhance it with a well-funded library system. Some of the $672 million is supposed to go to building trust. How is this substantial increase going to prevent what happened to Deborah Christian or Caleb Juku?

Trust can be stroking for next to nothing by treating members of the Black and Indigenous community with dignity and respect. And then, only then, can we build from there. Our community is not under police. It is rather underserved.

This present infrastructure gap, which I spoke about in my letter to council, being larger than national average for services such as the arts, culture and recreation prove that. The quest for accountability should be in uniformly applied to each budget item. The police budget should not get a free pass. If it does, it does are the service for future generations in London, especially those who are homeless, no income, elderly, disabled, newcomer, immigrant, Indigenous, black, racialized people of color and two-spirit LGBTQIA plus.

20 seconds. I’ve heard it said that we can’t reduce the budget because the police can appeal to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission. The municipal members of the AMO and FCM have banned it to fight the Ontario and federal governments who are guilty of downloading and underfunding of municipal partners. That the Ontario Civil Police Commission even has the power to override the wishes of citizens and castropic municipalities in the midst of a household opioid crisis.

It’s brutality, it is anti-dominant, it’s violence against a working class. Thank you for your responses. Fight this. No, it’s a fun community, fun here.

Okay, thank you. I’m going to the microphone on this side of the gallery and then I will be looking for Sarah, who’s joined us virtually. So this microphone first, please. Thank you.

My name is Reed. That’s R-E-I-D. The London Police Service has previously stated the cost of doing nothing is too high. If our city is not safe, businesses will close, jobs will leave and people will lose hope.

I will not let you assume what it is that I fear, nor will I let you exploit my fears for the purpose of supporting this budget increase. Everyone here should be asking themselves, who will this keep safe? What does safety mean to you? What does safety mean to your community?

What does safety mean to your loved ones, your friends, your family, your children? I am autistic. When I was still a child, my mother told me that I should keep a card in my wallet that says this. I am autistic.

I struggle to communicate. I may go nonverbal and stressful situations. The reason she told me to do this was clear, the police. My mother feared for me and the promise of protection from the police provides no solace because they are the ones that caused her fears.

My mother feared that my movements, my mannerisms and the way I communicate would make me a target for the police. The protection that the police provides is only indicative of what an individual officer believes to be unsafe. I’ve seen it used many times as justification for the harm that they have caused. The police have instilled much more fear in me than the things that they are supposedly protecting me from.

I do not feel unsafe as I pass by houses people on the streets of London. They are my peers. They are my friends. They are valuable members of my community and yet we have and continue to fail them.

These are the people we should be helping, not policing. In contrast to the 2000 documented houses people, landlords who own multiple properties across London are keeping their buildings vacant or continually raising rent prices for apartments that are considered health hazards by the Middlesex London Health Unit infested with cockroaches, bed bugs, mice and mold, all of which I am far too familiar with. Profits are time and time again prioritized over the health and safety of our community and this is only reflected by the proposed budget increase for the LPS. This is what is truly criminal.

Where is the justice? Where is the protection that you speak of? The message is clear. People with money are more important to you than those without.

There is so much more to be said than which I am capable of. Even as I stand here and speak of my fears I recognize that there are so many others that are at greater risk than I am so I will leave you with this. The London police voice their worry that people will lose hope. I fear that this is exactly what will happen if we allow them this budget increase.

Fund health care, fund education, fund housing, fund food, fund public transit, fund libraries, fund community supports, fund the people, not the police and I’ll say it again. Fund health care, fund education, fund housing, fund food, fund public transit, fund libraries, fund community supports, fund the people, not the police. Thank you. Thank you for joining us and sharing your personal stories with us in a public forum.

If Sarah would like to put their camera on and perfect we can see you and just making sure we should be able to hear you. Welcome and you have up to five minutes. Bajo, Sarah May, Indigo, C-H-I-T-T-Y is my last name. I wanted to say as already been said and much more articulately than me.

I also just want to say I’m continually amazed by my fellow Londoners and truly grateful for their comments and express gratitude to council members who actually took the time to engage with me prior to this meeting. That’s actually really meaningful and I recognize your jobs aren’t easy and I hope my frustration does not come across as disrespectful but the way people have been ignored and identified the callous remarks from councilors even in this meeting today I hope will be reflected upon and though I get into other things I do want to voice my support for housing business case P-14 though I don’t really speak to it. I don’t understand how the only movement the city has made on homelessness came actually from a private donation and so the lack of commitment to the whole of community response in this budget iteration and this approval process shows me the city isn’t really committed to doing something about it and I also want to support my support or voice my support for business case P-9 to support Goa Tashkad and of course because there are very few places in the city you can go for free and don’t have to spend money and I heard a really thoughtful thing from a library video where someone expressed that they feel like they’re treated like a person at the library and they feel seen don’t know how many people feel that way by police so I would like to call on you to support business case 38 and 58 and fund libraries and the arts and the sheer volume of people who wanted to participate tonight is remarkable to me and demonstrates that the mayor and London police regardless of what was said earlier did not do enough consultation with community or make meaningful engagement and if I have time I’ll speak to that a bit later but I really echo what Brendan Samuel said earlier and so many people are burnt out and tired because we’re all broke as heck and we’re trying to make living and we’re trying to be civically engaged and constantly advocate and I really hope the people that showed up today feel seen and heard by your community if not by council the police in the city and a caution council against dismissing the vulnerability of the sharing offered here tonight as well as the wealth of knowledge the research that went into what people said the stories and experiences that have contributed to meeting tonight probably will run out of time I wrote a letter please read it it’s in the agenda but I do want to remark that I heard a land acknowledgement at the beginning of this meeting and I would like everyone to take the time to meaningfully reflect on what those words even mean in the context of the history of London policing and reconciliation I think it would have been really important to frame your land acknowledgement acknowledging that the tax money revenue that we’re discussing on spending is generated on stolen indigenous land a dish additionally earlier a youth spoke to the importance of business case 13 I think it was the silver creek restoration and would like to invite council to actually apply the principles of dish with one spoon to the decision-making process in regards to land and ecological management and work with First Nations and indigenous people to prioritize the safety of all Londoners as our environment continues to shift due to external factors driven by exploitation of land and resources and I wrote this part in my letter but I am quite stunned by the contradictory of the land acknowledgement and the budget has nothing to do with reconciliation or calls to action or calls to justice I want to note that a counselor stated in mass email sent to everyone that let’s be clear Londoners are calling the police this notion that Londoners would rather have mental health and social workers is not reflected in the number of calls for police on an average day there are 10 mental health addiction calls and four of those result in apprehensions this makes no sense to me because we actually shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back that four people four of 10 mental health addiction calls result in apprehension considering that last year 80 percent of people in Ontario jails were actually legally innocent and there’s that whole thing about catch and release but I don’t know how that even really factors in when that is the case and on top of that um you know we just had a death in the emdc and jails are overcrowded so yeah let’s put people with no decision in jails oh great I have like no time uh I just want to say lending care stats are that they received 3661 calls last year which equates to about 10 calls a day and they show additional numbers of ways they’ve connected people to services um so I urge you to uh decrease the allocations to the police budget business cases 28 29 and 57 and I urge you to hold LPS accountable to the outcomes they allege we will see as many people like Zilloway’s stuff earlier was amazing like there’s no data to support this and I don’t understand how we can continue to make decisions without data and evidence-based practices um and at the end of the day as many people have stated police are just band-aid solutions the further criminalization of poverty and intergenerational trauma will place more people in precarious living shape and which um that is your five minutes um and I will note that your correspondence is located within page 121 of tonight’s agenda for everyone’s reference back in chambers lower the side perfect hi is it okay for me to speak um you can just angling your mic up a little bit or we’ll turn up the volume your choice hi okay i’m jeff angst i’m a registered nurse uh the first thought that i had was that in classes when we were learning about mental health issues um throughout history um the treating uh mental people with mental health issues they’ve either gone to prison or they’ve gone to the health system so it’s kind of cycled and I think it’s related funding um the more you fund police the more um it’s uh used to criminalize poverty mental illness addiction those kinds of things uh there’s all kinds of research that says if you uh like the social determinants of health if you spend money upstream such as on social programs uh helping people on the front lines hiring more people that you’re actually saving money like a Finland study said if you house people you you can save a lot of money our uh our program in the city that uh gives uh safe supply to uh to people who have substance use uh challenges uh they don’t have to try and get 400 to 800 dollars a day to to subsidize their their habit and so they don’t have to commit crimes just to just to survive every day so uh the things that make community thrive um for years uh if you look at the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein neoliberalism started in the 70s so the main tenets were decrease social spending decrease taxes privatize and regulate it’s made the rich richer in the poor poor we basically gone to every country put put these harsh economic conditions in and it’s uh it’s caused a disaster it’s like disaster capitalism so how the Nordic countries managed to thrive is they did the opposite they uh did a progressive tax system where they um they charged the rich in corporations more and they then redistributed the wealth and social programs so um it makes sense that when we have the opportunity to spend money on something uh we don’t spend it on police we spend it on frontline services we house people those are the things that are going to make the biggest difference to help people thrive um one of the concerns i have is that uh if if the mayor is on the police board um how can they uh be you know uh not biased or or is that a conflict of interest how does that work like i think it’s unfair that the police have somebody that can advocate for them um so no no slight to the mayor but i think the process is very um not conducive to uh helping the the people that deserve the funding and uh did the message from black lives matter resonate with people um how is it that if we think that uh we should take some of the resources from the police department and put it into frontline services and social workers and the rest how is it that a police board increase of 30 passes how how is that not questioned and and worked against uh like one of the books i read uh uh free economics it talked about uh people of color uh if they’re charged with the same crime as white people there are 17 to 51 more times likely to uh to be you know convicted also uh we know homeless people from the First Nations community it’s one in three people and they make up a disproportionate number of people in prison so giving the people the police more money is going to lead to uh to more um like more evictions more evictions from encampments i saw a police officer giving a ticket to a homeless person how is that money well spent um it’s it’s harassment it’s uh um bullying it’s badgering people and uh this isn’t a slight to the police force they they do amazing work they’re amazing people they’re good people um but if you use a hammer on something and not use programs that heal people you’re going to get the result where they’re traumatized and uh people have suffered and not enough like it wasn’t just uh the the massive transfer is a wealth upward since the 70s it was a 2009 crash due to the greed of derivatives that uh the subprime mortgage scandal nobody had we bailed out the banks for 800 billion in canada was 114 billion and then the pandemic massive amounts of wealth transferred upwards people are suffering uh forward took away rent control there’s 6200 families waiting up to 10 years for housing there’s uh 2 000 homeless people and we all deserve better we’ve been victimized by greed over and over again we don’t need our local council 30 seconds so uh mr hedges chris hedges Pulitzer prize winning novelist or or writer he was on the front lines of the iraq war while he was embedded for different wars and he said um what’s happening the us empire all over the world 700 military bases um that is going to come back to haunt us when they’re done finishing all those wars and and and without that greed all that militarization is going to be turned back on the on our own population and we’re seeing it like uh there’s never been more surveillance in uh in all of history so i really urge you to take another uh uh second look and i do want to talk to an ombudsman’s person or somebody about the mayor being on the board if that’s the only way to stop this horrible budget thank all of holy justice um that’s your five minutes and anyone who has an ombudsman uh inquiry uh their information is available on our website third party transparent um so i’m going to go to committee room three and then i’ll come back to the lower microphone um in chambers so committee room three um just making sure that your mic should be live if you just state your name and then i will start your time welcome hello my name is t i’m here to express my concern fear and disappointment regarding the proposition for an increased police budget i’m 22 years old and a recent graduate from western university when you speak to students about their intentions after graduating a lot of people talk about leaving london as soon as possible the reasons range from there being no jobs here to feeling like the city isn’t safe people say laddens transit is just way too bad not to have a car but they come forward a car so they look into moving people say there’s just nothing to do here people say the city is getting increasingly expensive there’s not enough community support homelessness is on the rise a lot of valid concerns all in all people are struggling hired and desperate for support with all of this in mind it is baffling alarming and confusing to consider additional funding for the police and their toys instead of actual essential services i love the city i want to remain in this city because london has something incredible and that is community we want community spaces third spaces where we can go where we don’t have to pay to exist like libraries this is what people need not a police state i’m a queer black woman black folks indigenous people racialized people queer folks people who are on house disabled folks people facing mental health issues i could go on and on and on these are all groups that desperately need additional support not additional policing there are people dying on the streets literally dying freezing to death in the winter and when you divert funding away from community services essential needs like housing we are saying it’s okay it’s okay for people to die on the streets for no reason while the police get a new drone the police don’t need a new drone they want one but you know who needs more funding london transit they’ll hybrid the museum tap center for creativity london arts council ontario works youth opportunities unlimited i could go on and on there’s not enough time so many organizations that are working for a vibrant supported london city council i cannot imagine the work and effort you’ve put into this process and i thank you all for doing your job council choosing to give the full half a billion dollars to the police is more than anything else a moral failing we are looking at you and history has its eyes on you beyond the right side of history by acting in the best interests of the majority the most marginalized members of our community are crying out please listen to us thank you going to the gallery bomb microphone in here and then i will be looking online for haley so just for they can be prepared welcome and state your name and give up to five minutes hello my name is kevin i’m award three resident and i’ve lived in london for ten years i’m here to say that i’m absolutely against this record setting police budget increase especially business cases p 28 p 29 and p 57 i demand the council does the same in the news the police chiefs explained that lps did a comprehensive study of londoners we’ve heard about a lot today which found that many people don’t feel safe in the city and the police chief also hears that mental health addiction and homelessness are the biggest challenges we believe our city faces and that leads me to a really interesting question why are we not spending most of our tax dollars on these services that exact that actually address these issues directly instead of the police almost all of that 672 million dollars can be put to much more effective use elsewhere why does the police receive 100% of they were of what they were seeking without scrutiny and organizations like public transit libraries and the arts receiving far less than what they were asking for and i’ve been told to accept what they’ve been given and to make it work how do we approve a 30 percent budget increase to any organization police or otherwise without scrutiny or further questioning how the london police association referred to citizens concerned about magic massive budget increases as radical zealots uh well as the so-called radical zealot um i demand that the police budget does not get passed without further review and in-depth review i might add um i see no good reason to give the police so much more of our taxpayer money i do not consent to my taxes paying for an increasingly militarized police force i do not consent to my taxes paying for london to become another cop city i do not consent to my taxes paying for shiny new toys and weapons for the police while marginalized people in our city are disproportionately targeted beaten and criminalized simply for existing i work in play in our downtown course so i’m there i’m here a lot and when i’m walking down the street and encounter an on-house person or somebody experiencing a mental health crisis i don’t feel fear for or i don’t fear for my safety i feel sadness and i feel anger that my fellow residents are being failed by a system that isn’t giving people what they need um i’d like to end by referencing the movie legally blonde if you’d like to humor me um housing community supports and public services will make people happy because their basic needs are met and happy people whose basic needs are met don’t commit crimes thank you thank you um and thank you for catching yourself before you clapped i appreciate that um looking to see haley online kate we can see you we should be able to hear you um welcome you have up to five minutes thank you dear mayor and members of council my name is haley i also want to acknowledge the intelligent meaningful powerful comments by many of my fellow londoners i grew up in london ontario attended biel art and as an artist and therapist living and working in london ontario i know firsthand the importance of the arts and of mental health support for these reasons i am here to voice my support for the following business cases p69 48 and 59 for supporting our libraries p8 and p38 for london arts council’s programs p15 and p16 for housing and p53 for road safety enhancements for the many londoners who cannot afford and do not want to pollute with cars i will briefly expand on a few of these now regarding london london’s mental health crisis our libraries function as essential safe third spaces for our communities my stepson goes to the karson library every single day it’s open it’s his safe place libraries are spaces where people can go for free to gather get out of the cold gain knowledge and skills spaces which serve to help londoners mental health all year round with the rise in homelessness addiction and poverty we very much need a Canadian mental health transitional caseworker at our downtown central branch regarding london’s arts i believe that the london arts council has proven a trap record of successfully supporting the local arts sector through their fair and equitable processes and programs that provide invaluable paid opportunities these programs sustain the livelihood of local artists promote the health and well-being of our community members and make londoners feel inspired proud and optimistic about the future of london as a unesco city of music and a member of the unesco creative cities network i believe that london must demonstrate how our community prioritizes creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development and recognizes participating in arts and cultural activities as a basic human right if you’re if you struggle to see it as such think about london without its festivals like sunfest or without essential hubs for the arts like tap and museum london and the grand theater the arts are a big part of what makes our city vibrant attractive and livable giving the growing demand given the growing demand for the arts and cultural activities for london’s growing population and increasing concerns regarding mental health crises inflation and financial difficulties for the arts workers and organizations i believe that the london arts council’s request is minor compared to the significant impact on the local arts sector which includes approximately 7 000 local arts and culture workers i also feel compelled to add my voice to the many londoners here tonight declaring that the police budget is too big and needs to be sent back for reductions the police budget is responsible for the majority of the property tax increase all other business cases had some cuts the police budgets should should see a reduction as well as a therapist i can tell you that preventing crime through social services is more effective than policing strong social services make a city much safer than policing social services need to be funded even if that requires a higher tax increase we are already increasing it a lot for the police we can increase it a tiny bit more for our social services we cannot afford we can’t afford not to have the services offered in business cases p 69 48 59 8 38 15 16 and 53 we need them finally i would like to thank those counselors who voted for amending p 51 transit service hours growth to add conventional hours to transit it i will end by saying these hours are still not enough to service our growing city or meet our climate goals please consider adding many more hours to our transit service hours thank you thank you going to the gallery bottom the side please i didn’t know that i could speak without without getting my name on the roster anyways i lived downtown i lived right across a safe injection site on in an alley between Richmond and all between between king and queen i lived with the homeless living in tents where i live i am not afraid of the homeless people i don’t know what the heck people in the city are afraid of i am you know i i saw one night there was mine minus 15 degrees i saw a cop pulling down a tent of some homeless person i went over to the cop and i said what the hell are you doing this might be the thing that kills that person that night and he didn’t he they took the thing away the tent away and i saw them left in destitution what the hell am i supposed to do i know i’m not supposed to swear but what are they supposed to do mine is 15 and the tent was taken away so you make this big budget increased 8 percent how many people are you going to put on the street you’re accountable for this you’re going to be putting people on the street you talk about homelessness i watch it all the time i see these people in desperation and you guys are part of it because you’ll find that the police that just oppressed them i’m more afraid of the police if i see some guy taking his tent taken away i’m afraid of him you know like i mean we all have some fear of the police anyways my point in all this is that there’s more and more and more poverty all the time prices of food going up rents are going up people can hardly survive i have trends or teachers that tell me that kids come to school all the time not fed you don’t think this is part of this problem of of parents having to find a way to feed their kids they feed them crap food because they can’t afford to pay the rent so they eat desperately and the food prices are going up so the for the quality of the food only goes down so my point here is if you want to find out what the problem is it may or the problem is our governments are not protecting us from the rich and the well to do the people who put the rents up my son in Kitchener has been put out of two places because the guy can put him out and he put him out so that he could raise the rent my son it might be living on the street very soon because two people have put him out so that they could raise the rent protect us from the rich and maybe we’ll be safe and maybe there will be less less insecurity in the world and maybe we won’t be having people that have to act in desperation the people think about the the French Revolution i heard that the French Revolution was caused by the rich and i thought what the heck is that all about but they explained that the rich squeezed the poor so hard that the the poor had to kill the rich to survive we’re getting close to that do you understand that do you want to help them you know what are you going to do you’re going to turn around and just give them the police more powers to oppress us more we’re sick of it all you don’t think we’re close to us rebelling against you all all forms of government we’re close i’m telling you thank you as you didn’t state your name for the record if you want to that’s fine if not you’ll just be listed as unknowing um going to uh committee room three uh someone’s at the microphone if you just want to state your name and then i will start your time and welcome i’m b c o u t o i live and work in ward four and i want to state on the record again that i’m against lps business cases p 28 p 29 and p 57 especially further i urge this council to vote against the lp l’s budget increase to be clear i’m not asking to defund the police i’m asking that the city of london does not vote to increase taxpayer dollars by five percent to fund the militarization of the city instead of the resources that our communities desperately need i further urge you to explore and discuss with london community members including unhoused folks not just the ceo’s of large public corporations who have a vested financial interest in policing i also question the democratic integrity of the london police association and it’s sitting members with regards to its libelous statements against taxpayers who are asking questions about the proposed 672 million dollar budget and where is democracy when i never receive a response from our mayor or my city councilor i also question the appropriateness of my city councilor who remains sitting on the london police services board while she is undergoing multiple investigations by the integrity commissioner as a constituent and a taxpayer i have zero faith in the so-called accountability of the lps board in an interview with the london if repressed police chief strong offered that mental health addiction and homelessness are the biggest challenges we believe our city faces then why are we not spending most of our tax dollars on those services why is the lps demanding for the biggest line item in the proposed city budget at 18 percent which is more than eight times the proposed spend on community housing for example for the safety of the whole community and not just wealthy londoners and business owners we need housing not guns surveillance or armored vehicles we’ve seen the research results which included that an increase in police budget does not correlate to a decrease in crime as well as research that shows how it is cheaper for us to care for people rather than criminalize and hospitalize them over and over again all of this data concludes that it costs taxpayers less to provide people with health care food and safe accessible and affordable housing than to police our communities the data concludes that if the basic needs of everyone in our communities are met if we improve people’s material conditions that is when crime decreases we need public resources not armed police in the press conference regarding the hockey canada sexual assault case and resulting charges i was disgusted at chief trong’s suggestion that the sexualization of women and girls leads to them being sexually assaulted to be clear the only cause of sexual assault is the assault or how can i have any trust in a police chief who wants to share the blame of alleged rapists with the community at large the lps are not safe for women and girls in the city of london lastly i understand that lps proposes to build a new police training center with this multi-year budget i am very aware of the ongoing mass protests and the police murder of a protester against the building of a police training facility in atlanta georgia and i do not want that in london area as a citizen as a taxpayer as your constituent and as a human being please know that building a new compound for practicing militarization tactics against protesters and unhoused people does not make me feel safer lps talks about their slow response time but hold a protest outside mcdonald’s and you’ll find officers on the scene within minutes how curious this budget approval process has been an illusion of democracy since my ward’s public meeting on the city budget i’ve been asking questions of my counselor the mayor police chief trong the l police lps board and lps media services and zero replies you tell us democracy is engaging city officials in being part of the process participating in meetings like this but you’re lying to us you speak about transparency and accountability and i have seen none i have read the now defunct a safer city now web page and lps materials and have followed our mayor and police chief’s media interviews and i feel less safe now than i ever have in this city as a result i have and many of us are bearing witness to your willing disregard for serious and important questions to make land and safe we community care not militarization thank you and free pelson thank you going to the microphone top gallery on this side and then i will be looking for jamie who’s joined us virtually welcome uh just at your name and you have up to five minutes welcome thank you very much my name is sherry lake ch er y l a k e and thank you honorable counselors staff and fellow londoners for your time here i have been a resident in ward one for over 45 years i’ve lived in london for over 60 and over those years i’ve seen this city grow and change so much i remember riding a horse just outside of london and now there’s houses there so i’m here today in full support of the london police budget i’d like to start off by personally thanking my busy counselor hadley mccallister for answering my email and letting me know that he is fully behind this budget i’m encouraged to see that there is support at city hall for these important investments in our police it’s clear we need a police service that has adequate staff for our growing city and a police service that is equipped with the modern tools that other police services already have we have to ensure our police have what they need to do their jobs and keep us safe i support hiring more officers cracking down on dangerous driving and moral resources to keep londoners homes and businesses safe counselors the decision is clear let’s support our new chief and all the women and men who do their very best to keep us safe every day on the one hand we know what happens when we don’t invest in our police it’s the story of the past few years our city gets worse on the other hand if you make this choice to invest we have hope there is a fighting chance at a brighter future please vote for the police budget in full do the right thing we need every dollar let’s build a better and safer london for everyone thank you so much for your time thank you uh going on now online for jamie yes that’s me i believe you’re referring to um welcome and you’re up to five minutes perfect good evening city council my name will remain most uh publicly visible but i will descend in saying that not allowing for anonymity has put marginalized people in the line of danger and if you don’t believe that we need to look at how Ferguson protesters were targeted after their anti-police actions and with moving on from that i am an activist and an autonomous harm reductionist and freedom teacher i have dealt with unnecessary intense harassment from police in both of these settings which is part of what empowers me to make this speak during street outreach i was arrested intimidated by female officers who when i asked them why they were sleeping a homeless man who was just trying to sleep they decided to turn it on to me and why i wasn’t helping him as if i was not helping him there asking me to doctor my name and take him home with me how is that ever appropriate and i’m going to also address the activism situations if you look at this um a tactic called cuddling which is a military tactic is used by a running police force against its citizens who go and protest rightfully for Palestine and people say oh they’re worried about the kool-aid drinkers who are making it worse making people unsafe let me tell you this as someone who is a uh soon to be student uh for conversion to feudalism i feel safer at those protests wearing a star of david then i do around our police any day of the year especially when they’re cuddling no i will go into a little bit background about me i’m white multiply disabled physically uh and mentally transgender have charrette syndrome ADHD and being tested for autism and had OCD that made me delusional when i was younger younger um all of this put me in harm’s way as a police aside from my whiteness i need to talk about the fact that you are criminalizing people like me who divert from the norm and we see that more and more people are seeing that some of you may already know me as i’ve been a vocal and passionate advocate for the city i loved the city i grew up in the city that now has clear intentions to push people like me away and people people people even more marginalized a city that’s was slowly killing me and many others with its neglect and violence i bring up all my intersections for a key reason all of these aspects have made it so i have had to temporarily leave the city due to the underfunding of social support services where is that funding it’s insulting you have the audacity to sit here and spend over six hundred and fifteen million dollars on a budget increase for an already bloated police budget when people actively serving and protecting within their own communities as they say uh community members who are often racialized or disabled and low-income themselves are having to leave the community that they don’t care so much about that they protect i’m going to dive into the fact that even though i’m put at risk from the police um i am i am safer than a lot of black and indigenous neurodivergent and disabled people and i was lucky enough to find a safe place to be for black and indigenous folks the rise of violent racism within our city both institutionally from the police and on personal levels are a major factor uh in terms of someone’s safety or does their safety not matter as you can see there are massive widespread crises throughout our city that go on met instead of funding supports for our community members like this you criminalize them you incarcerate disabled and mentally ill and black and indigenous folks at a drastically disproportionate rate and yet you don’t look to uh at the circumstances leading to that level of prices poverty and lack of community services which affect all aforementioned populations uh at disproportionate rate are major factors in crime occurrence why don’t you reduce those factors for them but but instead you decide to paint these communities racially and ableously yet fail to help any of the impacted parties out of poverty let it be known that you claim to aim for equity but you do the exactly the opposite in your policy you claim to be reconciliation driven and make land acknowledgments but you continue to enact genocidal violence on indigenous community members what do you say about incarceration and involved in the child welfare system i will end with this some of you like to performative with quote malcolm acts to signal your support for black communities but let me remind you he stated that the biggest threat to what the black community was not the take it home but white liberals who were unwilling to compromise or who were willing to compromise on his liberation that is all brief Palestine thank you for being with us this evening and sharing your personal story would like to go to committee room now if i see someone at the lectern hey there might should be life uh just your name and then i’ll start your time and welcome i’ll not be stating my name but i’ve lived in london london my entire life i’ve worked in community services in ward four thirteen fourteen seven one and three additionally i’ve worked as a seasonal staff and community neighborhood resource centers across london for serving unhoused food and secure uh new new coming new coming londoners racialized and queer communities for these londoners i want to say the lps does not mean safety they’re the ones committing they’re one of the greatest perpetrators of violence against them in fact one instance was this past summer when i was working in a neighborhood resource center i worked in food security in one day an unhoused woman arrived in desperate need of food and toiletries they took everything she told me her inner community were beaten were beaten in all of their means for life confiscated by the london city police all they had were tense in the forest yet the city would fund the continuation of these acts rather than the prevention of by funding social services that empirically decrease crime rates london is in fact decreasing in crime when you situated across the last decade so how can you claim that this budget serves the growing needs of our community at large when the needs of the city’s most vulnerable are social services that shelter them from poverty and violence please turn parties vacant buildings into social services and affordable housing don’t modernize the weaponry used to displace unhoused and marginalized from them this budget funds a displacement of unhoused often racialized in queer communities into the woods so middle-class londoners who can afford to drive into work don’t have to think about them body cameras can be turned off and they can be manipulated by police officers and by by no means an effective means of accountability and what and what way are the so-called needs of our growing cities served by a training center for amongst other things an additional light armored vehicle on top of the one that is already owned and the two that are loaned by general dynamics regularly and tasers beyond the criminalization and targeting of racialized on-house and queer communities please please just explain to me how are drones used to surveil black and indigenous and racialized youth protesting the disproportionate amount of police violence used against them how will that decrease crime please it is all is genuinely a myth that budgetary increases generally correlate with a reducing crime it is a myth that comes out of upper criminal class largely white residents whose property the police protects social services give racialized queer and displaced communities a place to thrive police ensure white middle-class taxpayers and property owners don’t have to see them you don’t want uh you don’t want to protect unhoused and racialized queer communities if you’re expanding the salaries of those who displace them and the weapons they need to do so not only is this budget not going to go into services needed by the unhoused and marginalized but it’s money going towards the services who targeted and enacted violence upon them the most care hubs received an average of 10 calls per day last year fund these fund libraries fund affordable housing fund safe injection sites fund care not for cops free Palestine thank you uh looking to see if there’s anyone in the gallery at this moment hey um so i’m going to pause for a second just first show in the hands of the galleries like who has not spoken yet who still intends to speak i know i have one for sure okay maybe two and i saw some people online in the community room just trying to judge time as eventually so people might need a biobrake again okay i got one on the side okay um your name if you will i will start your time and then after you i’m going to go to um Leland who’s joined us virtually welcome and please proceed all right so for name we’ll go with the letter e from ward 13 and i wanted to say first of all i support p58 i work with the london arts council doing after school programming for kids usually age six to eight at the crouch community and resource center it’s a really great group of kids really diverse and they just have so much love for each other uh i’ve never seen any bullying any stoking of anger and seeing the joy in a kid’s eye when they bring me a bumblebee they made out of clay or like a christmas ornament for me to hang up or someone gave me a sticker to put on my jacket those are some of the most beautiful memories i have in this city and what they show is that we have a lot to learn from these kids who are born kind who are born generous and fearless and loving because that’s not what’s being reflected by this budget that’s not what’s being reflected when we take from housing supports when we take from community resources that’s not what’s reflected when you let the lps use inaccurate statistics to stoke fear in your population we elect you to care for our city and instead you light us to justify short-sighted non-solutions and that is if we give you the benefit of the doubt that you are trying to solve these issues because it’s either that that you are being short-sighted or that you are being deliberately harmful to this city we can’t find the money to enact universal housing but we can find the money to inflate a documented violent police force when we can replace the streetlights downtown with purple bulbs because that if you’re wondering why those are popping up it’s because it makes it harder to see your veins when you’re injecting yourself and i think that is a truer reflection of what this budget represents that we are forcing our neighbors who struggle with addiction into more dangerous situations that is cruel and i feel like that’s what’s being reflected you’re not trying to solve problems you’re trying to hide them in prison cells and you’re coming off like you’re interested in optics you’re starting your meeting with a land acknowledgement right before we blindly hand money over to the institutions who have fought for erasing the lives we now claim to protect and to acknowledge we’re worried about decorum when the lps have a complete monopoly on violence and face no repercussions so please prove me wrong i don’t want to sound angry i love this city but this short-sighted approach to policy making cannot fly fund care not cops free palestine thank you i’m going to go to leelan online um they can come on screen if they wish okay we can see you we should be able to hear you um and then i will go to the gallery um once leelan has finished uh welcome you have up to five minutes great thank you um hello everyone my name is leelan and i am a london resident living in ward four thank you to council for giving me the floor to speak i am here today like many to ask first serious reconsideration of budget business cases p 28 p 29 and p 57 before i get into my points as many of them have already been covered by my neighbors and i agree with them wholeheartedly i want to address some of the comments actually brought up by i believe the vp of the police board as both a survivor of intimate partner violence and a doctoral candidate in sexual violence research half of her speech was a red herring about addressing domestic violence and sexual violence through the police budget ignoring the many excellent points and research brought up by many of my fellow neighbors today first of all how dare you use sexual violence and domestic violence to tug on our heartstrings like that’s the bulk of the budget ignoring the tasers and the armored vehicles and all the other things that we’ve addressed how dare you bring it up as if the police force isn’t out there victim shaming blaming and committing and i speak with research facts again as a doctoral candidate in this area this is not an opinion these are facts that they are not out there committing these acts of violence on our marginalized population are you going to send three armored vehicles to protect these women are you going to taser their attackers um the reality is that the conviction rate for rape is 0.3 to 1.6 percent in canada that’s why women don’t report as well as obviously other people i’m saying women because that is what she mentioned in her speech we heard today today tonight many harrowing and vulnerable stories of sexual violence and how the police failed to protect us so police stop acting like this half a billion dollars is going to stop domestic violence or do anything to help it now for my main points advocates of the police budget argue that this is for our safety but none of this underfunding of our social services and overfunding of cops i had many anecdotes that many people have already mentioned so for the effort of time and my own speech i will not inundate us with them but none of that makes me feel safe especially as a member of ward 4 in which my counselor is not even present today what does make me feel safe and what research shows which will actually keep us safe is robust affordable housing and social supports for the most vulnerable in our community education involve programming for youth such as the arts and sports what doesn’t make me feel safe is a police force that gets a blank check with zero accountability for whatever budget line increase that they want while our vital social services are depleted and have to fight for the tiniest little crumbs while under the most microscopic of scrutiny i dare you to tell me with a straight face that that is fair that it is fair that our social services like places like safe space that do vital vital work in our community you have to beg and plead and and vouch for themselves and and go through basically libel um and uh false facts that are made against them but the cops get to do whatever they want i was going to spend the next two paragraphs reciting all the aggregated academic research about crime prevention but we’ve already heard a lot of that tonight and the facts are clear now i don’t know whether facts or emotions will appeal to you all but the facts are clear they are unequivocally clear more policing does not prevent crime a more increased police budget does not prevent crime it barely even responds to it so knowing this why is it that the London police services can ask for these exorbitant budget increases get them approved with no questions asked and the London Public Library can’t get a budget increase that will allow branches like Carson to survive which i use and is a vital lifeline for my neighborhood why do the London police services get $673 million and it is never even questioned i want us all to take a moment truly to think about to imagine what London the London that we could live in would be if we put an amount that is just 10% of the proposed police budget amount which is $67 million by the way if that was allocated to holistic health affordable housing and education what would London look like if we did that i mean i would love the whole budget to go to that but just 10% what would that look like so it seems council to me that we do have the money for our social services we are just grossly misallocating funds it also seems very clear to me from today and the weeks leading up to this meeting that enough Londoners have objected to this egregious budget for it to at least be deferred for our voices to be heard yet you seem to be powerless in the face of London police services and now i am privy to all these conflicts of interest in my opinion stating that it will go through in 30 seconds well let me end but let me end by reminding you that your constituents aren’t powerless we voted for you and we won’t be stylists and we will remember your citizens have spoken and we say no to the budget line increases of P28 P29 and P57 thank you for your time thank you gallery top on this side okay if someone in chambers perfect okay so microphone on this side to go live please if your name if you will or would and then your time starts okay my name is Cassandra hello sorry i just need you to let it is just going to turn your mic up i just ship for everyone can hear it i also have a soft voice which i love can you hear me yeah thank you my name is Cassandra hello everybody um i definitely don’t envy you i feel extremely overwhelmed right now um and the decisions that you’ve had to make and having to just fathom all of the hard decisions within this budget making process um i’ve been debating how to use this this five minutes and what the best way is because i’m really in support of um a lot of the liners who have come out my community members saying and i just want to say like urge all of you here to listen to those voices and what i’ve really noticed is that those that are speaking in support of fully full support of the police budget are those who experience privilege every day who have power every day and those who are speaking against um the full allocation of the budget are those who are experiencing marginalization and harm at the hands of the police that does include myself who has also i mean been through through experiences and i i don’t feel safe by the police um sorry i just don’t want to go into my personal stories um i’m a little i’m i’m i don’t feel safe here speaking to you because i’m very concerned that you’re not listening to these voices i see i’m a resident uh and homeowner in ward one i’ve been seeing my city counselor here on his phone um a lot of the time as as many of you have been and so that’s what makes me feel unsafe and unheard and i just want to urge you to really listen to the voices of the people who are are deeply impacted by and who are losing their lives and their wellness um every day because of the inequality of power so just acknowledge the power and privilege that you all carry and listen to the voices of those that that do not carry that in particular so i do work in the in the field as well and support folks directly through low barrier housing and i i didn’t really know but based on what i’ve heard tonight i really want to throw support behind the p16 housing stability bank fund i i know firsthand that this is essential for people um who are experiencing or about to lose their their housing and go back to the streets and and also the extreme clean i didn’t get the p15 or p17 number on that but that is so important for um the whole community response that’s uh that’s um really looking at the high acuity folks this is an essential service that is needed that is low cost like um somebody else has said tonight i also wanted to all i kind of pointed out right that power imbalance but uh i agree that you know those ones that are speaking from the position of being on the police services board that that didn’t sit right with me um i know that they’re those are important voices but they have already been hurt because that budget’s already here and already very strongly supported by by many of you so i just want to end by saying what i said please listen please listen to the voices of the most marginalized people in the city thank you thank you going now to the committee room i see somebody at the lectern if you would like to give your name that do so and then i will start your time and welcome hello my name is alison um yeah i also just want to echo and really thank all of the community members that have spoken tonight um that are for community and know that the police are not part of that um so a couple points i want to make one um as well just to echo sarah may that talked about just the discrepancies between like doing the land acknowledgments and then the the colonized way that you actually like run this so asking for like the social decorum and like no clapping and stuff like that that’s the social decorum like methods they’re one of the ways that they push through residential schools which i have been informed by indigenous community members right so i just want to echo that that that that that that that that we we we see that we see you making these land acknowledgments and it’s empty because then the way that you actually run and the way that you paddle us and tell us to behave is colonial practices that you are going to engage in so that’s very clear to all of us um again what’s uh so another point that i wanted to make again someone else i said this as well too but just with the protests that are going on so there was a protest that happened at mcdonald’s last week the police were called and they showed up within 20 minutes okay that is corporate property they’ll show up in 20 minutes and they’ll be there and they will use intimidation tactics for corporate property and that’s what they’re for that’s what they will use all of this money for and it’s for protesters right and someone else spoke to like the youth that come out to protest and the way that youth get engaged in protest and and to know that that is what is going to be the target of this then right like they’re going to target protests they’re going to target the youth is what’s going to happen at this um so that’s also very very obvious to us um so then yeah i really just want to like take my time and really like align myself with speakers like Anna who spoke and i’m going to just reiterate things over and over and over again because you you need to hear it over and over and over again not another nickel not another dime no more money for lps crimes not another nickel not another dime no more money for lps crimes not another nickel not another dime no more money for lps crimes not another nickel not another dime No more money for LPS crimes, fund art over cops, fund housing over cops, fund care over cops, fund transit over cops, fund mental health over cops, fund libraries over cops, fund art over cops, fund housing over cops, fund care over cops, fund transit over cops, fund mental health over cops, fund libraries over cops, fund art over cops, fund housing over cops, fund care over cops, fund transit over cops, fund mental health over cops, fund libraries over cops, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for LPS crimes, not another nickel, not another dime, no money for LPS crimes, not another dime for LPS crimes, not another need for LPS crimes, fund care, not cops, free, free Palestine. Okay, thank you.

Person on the side of the gallery is no longer there. So looking to see if there was a speaker on this side. If not, I’ll go back to the committee room. So just trying to get a sense of where we’re at for everyone’s information.

The Zoom guests have been exhausted unless someone logs back in who hasn’t had a turn yet. As of right now, the Zoom list is complete. Is there anybody in committee in here in council chambers? Okay, we haven’t closed the PPM.

There’s a still can to change your mind if you want. So going, I just, I can’t see the committee room to know how many more speakers are in there. But if someone would like to go to the left turn, maybe somebody’s there. I’m sorry, it’s just really far away.

Perfect. So welcome if you want to state your name and you have up to five minutes. Yep, sorry, committee room is all you. And then I’ll come back to the gentleman in the gallery who just returned.

Thank you, Councillor. I just want to start by saying my name is Harris Ancer or Harris Ancer. I was born and raised in London. I’m currently a ward eight member and I would like to thank council for giving me the time and opportunity to meet and organize with amazing individuals of this community.

I’m sad that it took this budget increase for me to meet those who actually care about our communities and the over hunting of cops. I’ve moved around a lot within several wards of London and I think I’ve had a versatile and unique experience within this city. I’m currently a sociology student here at Western and echoing with a lot of others have said previously, indigenous, queer, unhoused people of color, those with disabilities, they’re all disproportionately affected by post-colonialism society that we live in. Ty Trong also has a sociology degree and I wonder if he knows better about the implications of the militarization of police and unjust use of force, mostly on indigenous people and people of color.

We’ve had heard the countless stories and harrowing stories of the crises people are in due to hunger, poverty, lack of affordable housing. Yet we’re still seeing LPS get more and more power to displace and abuse individuals, especially those of color who are queer, who are indigenous, who are unhoused. What about the meetings that the LPS, the LPA, Mayor Morgan have behind closed doors? Is that not a conflict of interest?

Is that not a penal populism? What about the manufacturing of consent that’s occurring? What about the LPS that’s been using fear-mongering tactics so that they can justify tax increases that only they can afford? What about the amounts of police officers suspended with pay, one being Elden Omarovich, who actually, I know this for a fact, who was suspended with pay in 2021 of September, but still had enough money somehow to purchase a sport hatchback in 2022, July.

I know that because I sold him the car, unfortunately, and I’m disgusted by proxy. And I only found out about this about a month ago, so you can understand my frustration. Aside from that, let’s talk about what really baffles me. A city that’s willing to turn a blind eye to people who have vacant properties left for nobody.

I’m talking about Farihi building specifically. Never once have we looked at Schmiel Farihi and his complacency in making, or not making available spaces for on-house individuals. I wonder how much of his father’s genocidal IDF life, car house insurance money went towards instilling this capitalistic and colonial mentality. Let’s take a look at some of the facts.

I have an online Ontario Sunshine List. Sorry, I’m gonna have to ask you to pause. I pause your time, just watch your comments, please. I have concerns raising here in chambers.

Hey, proceed. Okay, thank you, Councillor. So we have on Ontario Sunshine List, there’s about 604 available entries for those who are working for the LPS and also have an income above six figures. So we’re already looking at millions of dollars being spent for police budgets.

Now, if you actually go to the LPS website, you can actually see their expenditures, what they expected and their actual expenditure. You can actually see that they went $3 million above their actual expenses for personnel costs, totaling to $125 million. Even within 2021 to 2022 alone, there’s a 7.8% increase in terms of a budget or income for individuals who are officers. You have about 105 complaints as of 2022 for a conduct complaints that I would hope are being looked into.

If you even go on to the satisfaction levels of residence police patrols, only about 50% of people actually want more street foot patrol. If you look at the OIR, sorry, the OIPRD, the Office of Independent Police Review Director, most of the people who are in power are actually former police officers. I wonder if that’s a conflict of interest. So we do have the manager of investigations who is actually a former officer and president of the Peel Regional Police Association.

We have senior investigators who are also former Toronto detectives, Dork detectives and sergeants. So I wonder if there’s a conflict of interest there. And I think you can see why we don’t trust this police increase or budget increase. So how does this help our community?

Our trickle down economics are never going to help contribute to unhoused individuals. If not negatively, you don’t look to academics, the economists, even the retired police chief, Murray Faulkner, had said previously that officers or more police officers doesn’t necessarily correlate with lower crime rates. We should fund education, fund housing, fund care, fund mental health, fund libraries, over cops. I find it ironic that the slogan of LPS is deeds, not words, because so far I haven’t seen any words nor deeds, justifies that justifies this budget increase.

Free Palestine, thank you. Thank you, microphone top gallery on the side, please. Welcome, state your name if you’re comfortable in five minutes. Start my timer as well, sorry.

Can you hear me okay? Well, I’m a little torn here. I came in thinking I may or may not make comments. I have not, I’m shocked, the disdain, the anti-police rhetoric that I’m hearing around here is quite troubling.

I understand where people are coming from. I understand people’s stories and I just, some disrespectful signs out here that are somewhat offensive. Start with the police budget. We need to do something about the response times for police.

Yes, there are some frills in there that we can take out. When I say we, council obviously cannot direct how the police, what the police do, but be a proof of budget. So if you wanna remove the $42.5 million, it goes to a training center and to the armored vehicle, that would be a good start. I was at the last PPM, I do have to say, quite frankly, this is all somewhat of a sham.

We were here back then before the actual strong mayor budget was released. These PPMs are going through the motions. I, with all due respect, I think a lot of you have come in here with how, with a view of how you’re gonna vote anyhow and over the last six weeks, five weeks, you’ve discussed it and you’ve pretty much come up with your decision anyhow. So what I say, what others say, somewhat unimportant.

Other things to address, not directly any business cases. Oh, sorry, side note. We say we can’t run immunocipality by business yet. We call all these business cases.

Kind of an interesting thing. What I’m saying about this whole facade is, you just don’t listen, you really don’t. I mean, I was at this, the last four-year budget meeting, asked some questions, following year asked the same question, I didn’t know where things went to. We spend $13 million on consultants to study a new, a new city hall, and here we are four years later, looking at, oh, that 13 million taught us that we need to spend 11 million on fixing this city hall.

Just kind of a little troubling when, then we immediately afterwards go to the feds and the provincial government, groveling for money. We went through some high tax increases. The last time, and I hate using the word I, but we up here, pulled you some of the things that shouldn’t have had money spent towards them. The consultations, consultants were happy.

The consultations on a new city hall. Gonna shift a little bit to something else, BRT, the over budget, BRT. Now, it was prophetically, prophetically named shift. And we only learned that now because we’re shifting money from, we’re gonna shift money from Oxford and Wonklef, we’re gonna shift money from Wonderland expansion, we’re gonna shift money from development charges to pay for a mismanaged BRT that you wouldn’t listen to us.

Tying it all together, these tax increases are too high. It’s unsustainable. I said it four years ago, I’ll say it again. Having said that, I was gonna have a lot of ground to cover, but I’ve pared it down quite a bit.

Some thank yous are in order. Thank you for fixing the lighting on West Oxford. Thank you. - 30 seconds.

Thank you for some of the roundabouts and not for others. Thank you for the downtown office conversion space funds that hopefully will take care of things. Thank you for the RFPs or the potential RFPs for city parking lots. I don’t like using the term I, but did suggest that six and a half years ago at a PEC meeting and my time’s up.

And we’d just like to say that thank you for bringing that up and thank you for pulling that up. Thank you. Okay, going back to the committee room. Someone is at the lectern if you would like to state your name and then I will start your time and welcome.

My name is Margaret Spelt, M as a mango, A-R-G-A-R, E-T as in tomato, T as in tomato, E. I hope I spelled that correctly. Okay, seeing everyone’s comments about the defunding the police, it’s great. I was here under the complete different impression.

I’m just here to talk about funding for LTC. So I hope that is okay ‘cause I know this is a very serious issue and I’ll proceed with that. I began taking the LTC in 2014 for high school. Waiting at the bus stop for the first time, I was, I felt a mix of anxiety and excitement.

I was worried about getting lost, but was still to navigate the city on my own without bothering my mother at 6 a.m. after her late night, overnight shift. Thankfully, I had times, I have friends that I could call or text to reassure or guide me to correct stops, but there were a couple of times that I found myself in a bit of a bind. I got lost a few times, forgot to get bus tickets or were short a couple coins.

Out of those situations, I was and still am immensely grateful for those bus drivers and their help. They gave me directions, told me which stop to get off at and let me be a deadhead despite my own carelessness. Seeing a poster about funding cuts for public trends, it surprised me considering the high ridership and recent fare increases, but upon scanning the QR code and looking through all the statistics, I was a confused and thought of this as a great opportunity to show my support for a system that supports me. As I was writing this essay, I have come to appreciate not only the independence is that it afforded me, but also the invaluable assistance provided by its drivers.

These encounters highlight the importance of public transportation in our communities and the need for continued support and funding to ensure accessibility and sustainability for all. To start, I want to talk about things we should understand when it comes to traffic. Has anyone heard of the Downs Thompson Paradox? No shame if you haven’t.

I didn’t know about it until recently. This concept is popular in urban planning and is based on the idea that building more roads can initially reduce congestion, making driving more attractive. This in turn can lead to more people choosing to drive ultimately offsetting the initial reduction in congestion. In short, it means that it doesn’t matter how many roads you build, car traffic will get worse and worse and worse until it becomes faster to take the bus.

The perfect example is our favorite highway. Can anyone guess which one I’m talking about? 401, thank you, I’m so glad. That monstrous cluster of roads is 18 lanes wide, yet still gets clogged with traffic on the daily and we keep thinking that road expansion is the answer.

Now going back to how car traffic gets better, when buses are faster, I have a graph from the Transit Street Design Guide published by Matt Coe, the National Association of City Transportation Officials and the United States. It shows that the caring, I thought I’d be able to visually show this graph but I’ll try my best to verbally describe it. It shows that the caring capacity of a single land of traffic of different types. So motor vehicles can transfer on a single road of 600 to 1,600 people, whereas mixed traffic of buses and private motor vehicles would be 1,000 to 2,800 people.

Now a quote from the same source emphasizes the importance of measuring street performance, not just in terms of vehicle traffic throughout, throughput and speed, but also in terms of the number of people moved, a concept known as person throughput. While these figures are based on American data, they prove invaluable sites into how different modes of transportation can move larger numbers of people. For example, during the morning rush from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., let’s consider the capacity of private motor vehicles.

If we use a higher end range mentioned 1,600 people, and multiply that by two, we get 3,200 people. However, with a proper transit system, we could potentially transport double that amount, highlighting the efficiency of public transportation and moving larger masses of people. In a nutshell, learning about these ideas show us how tricky traffic can be, and while having a good public transport system is so important for keeping cities moving smoothly. Now, since the main topic is about funding, let’s talk money, and how other places can have, ooh, there’s people there?

It has been shown in multiple countries that having good public transport can produce a lot of money. And 2006, Tokyo generated 2.63 billion in revenue on route to 587 million in profits. Well, rail fares brought in about a third of that figure. This that makes me question what was being done with the extra money from our fair increase.

I understand that we can’t reach those numbers, but I remind you that this statistic came from 2006. 30 seconds. That has invested heavily in the public transit that even got heavy support from their government is Amsterdam. An investment of 5.4 billion euros is planned for Amsterdam, of which 4 billion will be provided by the government and 1.3 billion by regional and local authorities.

People taking the bus are looked down upon, and anybody wealthy enough to have any political influence, whatsoever, doesn’t care about improving service, just because we lack funding, air quotes, please. I understand it’s a bold claim, but from my perspective, I’ve never heard any political figures for London even talk about improving public transit. To quote a content creator, Jason Slaughter, a Canadian Dutch man who examines urbanist issues and compares the environments of the Netherlands to the United States and Canada, he said that, quote, “If the public transport system is only used by the poor or desperate, then it’s a failure. Public transport has to be a real opinion.” Thank you, that’s your five minutes.

Thank you. Thank you. And I did note earlier, just if people had communications they want to send in for the public agenda, the deadline’s 9 a.m. tomorrow, and it’s council agenda at London.ca if you wanted to send in some stats or whatnot.

As I know, you did it more to stay. There is another speaker at the lectern in committee room, so welcome. You have up to five minutes, and I will commence your time after you give your name if you want to give it. My name is Nisa Adens, spelled A-N-I-S-O-A-D-E-N.

I want to first thought off by saying, if you ever wonder why people are so disillusioned when it comes to politics and voter turnout is so low, I think that you should think back this time. There are so many people that will lose their homes, access to food and safety because of your decisions, and you guys will continue to afford with the budget plan that’s already in place. And it’s upsetting to know that as we sit here. Now, there was a gentleman here earlier that made mention of the quality of food children have in schools.

Children in schools have access to. A man who also referenced the French Revolution and wasn’t silenced or censured like Harris was. My brother was also a student teacher in the east end of London, Ontario. He, one time came home and told me that, and I was shocked to find out that there were students who would come to school with no food whatsoever, sometimes smelling of urine, being completely unwashed here or clothing.

A lot of schools in elementary schools in London, Ontario have started to have free breakfast and lunch programs to make sure that these children can go home, having something to eat during the day. And it’s upsetting to understand that social services will be cut in order to provide the London police with another tank. Now, many here have suggested other useful alternatives for this money, and I second the notion that this exorbitant increase in the police budget is a diversion of funds from the resources that benefit, provide for and actually keep London or safe. More police will not create a safer city.

Now, I actually used to be an employee at a pharmacy in London, and we called the police for every type of major crime, almost. Narcotics fraud, assault with weapons and granularity. Every time we called the police, we waited for hours, we wrote witness statements, and not one of these calls were fruitful, not one report resulted in any charge being laid. This included an instance in which we kept the gentleman in store who had fraudulently received an incredibly large amount of opioids for over 45 minutes on one day.

We had made an appointment with him for three days later, notified the police of this, kept him in the store for 45 minutes, and he was missed. And they could not do anything with the footage as well that existed. I’m also deeply upset at the comment that was made previously by, I believe it was a board member, a police board member, and I think that the comments really show how disconnected the board members are from the community at large. Now, I volunteer for a national nonprofit organization that seeks to address many things, but specifically gender-based violence in Canada, across Canada, we’re at an AGM, London, Ontario, was highlighted for how dangerous it is for women.

Almost every major city in Canada was represented, and we, not Toronto, not Montreal, were highlighted. People in this room also had prepared more stories about women’s experiences with the London Police Services. Like, this is like, it’s nationally known that they are bad when it comes to violence against women. So you guys told women when it comes to, when you need to generate support and drum up, you know, fear about women being assaulted, but when it comes to the experience of women actually reporting domestic violence and sexual abuse and sexual assaults, they are diminished, they are treated as if they’re the criminal, they are not believed, and they are subjected to a bureaucratic run around.

Now, my first understanding of the relationship between the LPS and gender-based violence was my mother. She worked as a family home visitor, it was an old program that was made for people experiencing domestic violence. After a year of working at this program, I was 12 years old, and she told me to never call the police when it comes to if I’m ever hurt in any way. She said that she would rather our family take care of it, my mother dealt with the London police for one year, a London police and domestic violence victims, and she decided that vigilante justice was the best way to go about dealing with them, dealing with any type of abuser.

Now, sorry, trying to make this short. That was my first messaging when it came to, and a burst of many messages when it came to what to do in the case of assault and who to go, who to turn to, and that the London police were not going to keep me safe. Now, the London police, as I mentioned before, are famously soft on sexual crime. Most recently, the London police failed to forward the hockey-handed case.

The police officer literally had video evidence of these assaults. This reminds me when I first started my year, my first year at Western, where a young woman was detained for three hours and pressured into dropping the report of her sexual assault by a police officer, the video was released, slap on the wrist. Currently, there was a police officer last year that was, as we all know, charged for, at least charges were laid. For sexual violence, he’s currently still on the Sunshine List receiving pay.

He’s on the Sunshine List. 30 seconds. No, yes. So, like many of the women in the city, I have no one who experienced domestic violence, sexual violence.

I’ve never in my life witnessed a charge being brought forward, or, God forbid, a conviction. Thank you. Thank you. Looking for further speakers in that committee room.

Okay, yep, sorry, it’s just really far back. So, perfect. Welcome, you have up to five minutes, if you want to state your name, and then I will start your time, and welcome. Burillo, M-U-R-I-L-O.

So, there’s nothing that I can say that hasn’t been seen here by my community, by people who spoke way more eloquently that I can, way better than I can with way more experience, but it seems that people on the council, and from what I’ve heard, decisions are already made, that this public report meeting is a sham, has other people have mentioned, that this is just to placate the illusion of democracy, that nothing that we can say here can change the decision that has already been made. So, why are we here? What is this for, right? Are we not talking about budget?

Let’s review a couple of steps then. So, we’re in a city, this is Canada. This is London, Ontario. This is top 10% of the world.

Most people in the world are looking for food, and you’re defunding, not defunding, but you’re barely funding libraries, museums. The bus has any of you being the bus in the last year? I don’t think so, likely not, right? And meanwhile, you’re choosing to spend 600 million, more than half a billion dollars on a police service that is fraught with conflict of interest, with people on the council, and with fraught with conflicts and other accusations.

So, to review, you should be ashamed. You should be really ashamed that there’s people dying on the streets, on this stolen land. You can’t even figure out how to take care of a river on the stolen land that you have, even though you have all this land acknowledgments that you have, you can’t take care of a river because you wanna spend, or you wanna propose, 600 million dollars for the police. And you know why?

They’re doing 600,000 million, so much money, so that when we push back, they still give it 400,000 million. So, they still get a huge increase amount, and they pat themselves in the back of saying, look, we’ve done democracy, look how it works. While everything is still defunded with everything, like people on the streets, like you don’t try to imagine a situation where there are no people on the streets, you take that as a granted, as a thing that exists. And let me tell you, it does not need to.

You know, on Ontario, there’s more enough housing, there’s more enough money, there’s 25 million tossed around as a donation. What happens then when we tax these people? When we tax the undeveloped idle land that we see every week, when we go downtown, we see a new building that is doing land speculation on the land whose value is socially produced, and now there’s someone there just speculation. Tax those people, it’s gonna increase your budget by a lot, shockingly.

And while I’m talking about a budget, stop supporting and funding a colonial genocidal state of Israel and free Palestine. Thank you, further speakers in that committee room. Thank you, you have up to five minutes, if you wanna state your name. And then I’ll also note that if there’s other speakers, just be at the microphone for when this— My name’s Vieno, V-I-E-N-O.

I just wanna talk about a little bit about my own experiences having like lived and worked downtown for basically my entire life. Homelessness has been a major thing downtown for as long as I can remember. And it is, I think entirely shameful on the state of our governance that I’m still seeing people that I saw in high school on the streets. The same faces, the same names, the same situations.

And I think it’s also shameful that we are talking about funding the police when they’re the ones who inflict violence on those people. When we’re talking about what the police actually do to people, it is six-foot patrol officers going and tackling somebody into the concrete at Dundas and Richmond. It’s a store owner getting assaulted downtown and the police taking somebody away and then releasing them back onto the street within half an hour because our court systems are so overwhelmed that there is no actual consequence when assaults occur anyways. So you’re not actually doing anything by funding the police even from your own perspective.

You’re not making the city safer. You’re just repeating these cycles of violence and trauma for both the most vulnerable people in the city and the people that you’re supposedly helping like small business owners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I also wanna highlight the state of our jails, which is the other option for where people end up when they have these interactions with the police. A man, Brian Michael Myers died on February 16th in hospital after who’s found unresponsive in his cell at Elegant Middlesex Detention Center in London.

He waited more than six months for a bail hearing in jail. That is the kind of thing that you were talking about when you were talking about giving the police more money. You are just talking about inflicting the same cycles of violence to ensure that there are still people who are vulnerable and still people who are victimized and not actually solving crime by funding housing and social services and everything else that people have talked about today. I just, I really wanted to highlight the actual consequences of policing because the consequences are things get worse.

And that’s it. Thank you, have a good night. Thank you. Next speaker in that committee room, should there be one?

Hey, if there’s a speaker up for them, just get yourselves ready. Welcome, if you want to state your name and you have up to five minutes. Thank you. My name is Nicole and I see OLA.

Yeah, I’m here to speak on behalf of a mental health, the homeless, the police. Like I’ve been sexually assaulted. I’ve been drugged, be raped repeatedly. I did, I didn’t even call the police.

I went to urgent care at St. Joe’s. I did a DNA box kit. The police did absolutely nothing.

This is, this was in 2020. I lost all my memories and then they sent me to Motel 6 and they, they, I have a big boat, the Bordeaux. And they drugged my, they drugged, they also drugged my dog and they broke his back leg. And so I went to Motel 6 and it was also, it also happened there, right?

And I live in OPP territory, right? So it happened in OPP territory. So they did it in, so the, the London police, London police sent me to, and victim services sent me to Motel 6, right? So when they came to take my statement, it was the London police.

So it should have been the OPP police, right? So, and then it’s still been happening in the same place, which is OPP territory and skillless restaurant back behind there, right? So it’s like, and it’s still going on, right? So, and they do absolutely nothing.

So the police protection, they don’t do absolutely anything. They called me, they sent the DNA box to Toronto, which they said, oh, no, they found nothing and they still didn’t have the toxicology report. And then I made more reports, more reports and to some Luan who’s head of all these report systems, right? And she said, oh no, call the guy, call the Andrew Mitchell who was supposed to be the ongoing officer and because I’m not, I’m a mix, right?

So I’m not full native, I’m half native and whatever. I’m not too sure of my other ethnicity because of different backgrounds. Anyways, yeah, they do absolutely nothing. And I wake up, drugged and raped again, just like a month ago.

So, you know, and I had to go to my doctors just again and it’s still happening at my place of residence. You know what I mean? So like the police do absolutely nothing. I don’t trust police, they don’t care.

And mental health, I’ve been sent to mental health. I’ve been, I go to the, I go to ANOVA. ANOVA does nothing. I went to Lox, they changed their appointment and I called to change, to make another appointment.

They haven’t done anything. I went to Sarnia, I stayed in, I stayed in, ‘cause I went to get away from everything that was happening at my apartment out in OPV by behind the scale of this restaurant, right? And then I went to Sarnia to get away from it and these governments, the facilitator or whatever, sorry, I’m getting a little, I’m just a little nervous and stuff. So anyways, it’s called the In of the Good Shepherd Lodge on Confederation Street and they’re drugging people and they’re drugging people, raping, they’re letting all these things go on in all these places, same with Salvation Army and all these other places.

30 seconds. And another thing I want to know, what happened to the 25, the 25 million that was donated, especially for the homeless people here. And then the other 25 million that was matched, where is all that? Where’s all that?

How long ago was that, right? Where’d that go? Where’s all these places for the homeless to go to? Where to go to?

How come it’s not housing these people? Thank you, Nicole, that’s your five minutes. Thank you for sharing your story and your personal journey, looking to see, okay, I think there’s somebody else at the lectern, if you want to state your name and your five minutes will commence after that. Welcome.

Hello, my name is Rachel. I live in Ward Two. I am a disabled woman who can no longer work. I am supported by my partner, thankfully.

We also have an unhoused teen that lives with us because we are the ones that keep us safe, not you. We feed us, we house ourselves. And all this talk about decorum tonight really annoys me because it is reasonable for people to be angry when they are suffering. It is reasonable for people to be upset.

It is reasonable for people who not be able to control themselves emotionally when they are suffering consistently and you do nothing And you’re gonna give the police $672 million. And then chastise us about decorum when we’re suffering. That is nonsense and shameful. Keeps us safe.

We keep us safe. Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe. Keeps us safe.

We keep us safe. Keeps us safe. We keep us safe. De-criminalize our survival.

It’s time. Thank you. Thank you. Further speakers.

Neither speakers in that committee room. As I have none in chambers, not on Zoom. Okay, so I’ll do a final call. If there’s no one in that committee room who would like to speak, I will be closing the public participation meeting.

Okay, welcome. If you want to state your name and then you would have up to five minutes and welcome. Hi, my name is Emmanuel, E-M-M-A-N-U-E-L. I would have written something that I’m really tired.

It’s like, what, 945? This has been going on a long time and I don’t want to say anything that hasn’t already been said. I wrote a letter to the Budget Committee and then you can read that. It’s on the agenda.

I spent a lot of time outside of work trying to parse through all the different Budget Committee meetings and trying to understand how it worked so I could properly, properly express anything I was feeling about the budget. And I would love to echo everything that’s been said in this room about the police budget. And I’d also love to expand on everything that’s been said about the transit budget, but I’m really tired and it’s really hard to like stand and keep talking about things that have been said over and over and over again. At the end of my letter to the Budget Committee, I expressed feeling a bit hopeless because it didn’t, it seems so clear that the Committee had made up its mind for most of the Committee.

I watched the Transit Amendment fail the first time, 7 to 8 and then passed the second time, 8 to 7. And I was so tense, like that entire time, watching that process and all the discussion that were taking place happened twice. The first time watching it fail, my heart sank and the second time watching it pass, I was relieved but so incredibly tense. I had to take a nap afterward ‘cause it was so tiring, watching the process happen.

And I know that everyone who has been here is still really, really tired. And I just think, and I’m glad, honestly, I don’t feel as hopeless anymore ‘cause I’ve heard so many more voices than outside my own personal circle. Express this May and express frustration with how this has been going on. I wanted to point out, I think, two things that happened during the Committee meeting.

I think it was Councillor Ben Miraburgen who said that only 7 to 8% of our Londoners use transit. So why should we focus investing there? And that was so insulting. It was so insulting ‘cause I need transit to get around London.

It’s such a difficult city to get around. If I was going northeast or northwest, leaving, I live downtown, which is the easiest to get to anywhere in the city, but it’s so hard to get to so many different areas. And I don’t love spending money in the city because it’s so expensive to be here. I pay a lot of money in rents and if party tax increases a lot, I’ll pay more money in rents ‘cause they can use that as an excuse to raise rent prices.

It’s really tiring, I’m really tired. I think the Premier, Sean Lewis, mentions that transit was increasing. The increasing fairies and so they would have, and they said they were increasing fairies and so they expected buyers to decrease. But then in the month and a half that it took the meeting to get their fairies, ridership did not decrease.

I found that incredibly baffling to argue, I don’t know if I would have considered in the month and a half buying a car, leasing a car, that’s incredibly expensive. I don’t have the money to make these decisions. And I don’t like being trapped in the city and not being able to get places I wanna get to. I don’t like hearing at the official council budget committee meetings that my concerns are like a fringe minority that shouldn’t really be regarded too much about.

I just like, there are so many different times across the meetings that I watched that just felt like if I wasn’t specifically in that ward by that, in the ward that the council represented, and I didn’t like look like them and I didn’t like feed their exact profile, I didn’t matter to them. And that’s so concerning ‘cause this is a city council meant to represent citizens in the city. I’m really tired. And I keep saying that ‘cause I’ve been here for like five hours now and I came here right after work and listening to this go on and on and on.

I’m glad that I was here so I could hear arguments made that I’ve been wanting to make. And I’m really more hopeful now that those arguments will be heard and change can happen. But that’s not something— 30 seconds. I want to risk like not happening.

I really, really like I know that there’s been lots of repetition at this meeting, but that’s because so many people feel the exact same things even if we’re sending you the exact same email over and over and over again. That’s because we each resonate deeply with what that email contains. I want our voices to be heard and I want to know that the council can hear our voices and address our concerns, answer our questions and not continuously ignore us. Thank you, good night, I guess.

Thank you and for committee’s reference Emmanuel’s correspondence was contained within page 74 of your package. Looking to see if there’s any other speakers in the committee room, kind of like last call. Hey, I’m not seeing anybody. Hey, so I don’t see anyone in chambers.

There’s nobody new on Zoom who had registered who has since joined us and I do not see anyone at the lectern in committee room three. So that would bring us to closing the public participation meeting. I would need a mover and a seconder to close that. Moved by Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor Hopkins.

Everybody just spoke. Okay, calling the question. And being on like that was. Councillor Layman, Councillor Lewis.

Burbelli, yes. Closing the vote, motion carries 14 to zero. Thank you and as you heard, Councillor Lewis has rejoined the meeting a few speakers ago. Thank you to all 75 speakers who spoke this evening and to all those who joined us at various courses throughout the night and those who came after work or when we started at four o’clock and those who came even before that.

I will now need a motion to receive all the communications that were sent into this committee, all the written correspondence. I have a mover and Councillor Ferreira, a seconder and Councillor Raman calling the question on receiving those courses. Yeah, the Mayor Lewis votes yes. Yes, I also vote yes, I’ve logged out.

Councillor Frank votes yes. I vote yes. Closing the vote, motion carries 14 to zero. Thank you, I have no items for direction, no deferred matters or additional business.

We have nothing to be considered within a confidential session this evening, which would take us to adjournment and that could be done by a hand vote but I will need a mover and a seconder. Moved by Councillor Frank, seconded by Councillor Cuddy. Any Councillor Raman on screen? I do see them coming on screen so I hand vote all in favor of adjournment this evening.

Motion carries. Thank you, we are adjourned. Maybe mine, although they’re definitely mine. Thank you.