Sudbury city council votes down request for $3M in 'emergency' pothole repairs

Morning North6:02No extra money in Sudbury to fill potholes

Greater Sudbury city councillor Robert Kirwan put forward a motion to withdraw an extra $3 million from city reserve funds to fix potholes. He was voted down. We have a sample of the discussion that took place at city council.Some hard words were exchanged at city council Tuesday night over the state of Greater Sudbury's roads.

Ward 5 city councillor Robert Kirwan proposed pulling $3 million from reserves to do more pothole patching on major roads this summer.

He argued that the city's reserve funds are healthy and are squirrelled away for emergencies, like the number of potholes plaguing Sudbury.

"We have an emergency and there's one thing that people talk about if you asked them what the city council should do, it's repair our roads," Kirwan said.

He argued that this investment would save citizens "millions" in car repair bills and save the city in the long-run. But general manager of Infrastructure Services Tony Cecutti disputed that.

"It would be foolish to suggest that $3 million is going to get rid of our pothole problems," he said,.

Kirwan's fellow councillors were more worried about making another withdrawal from the bank, after pulling $6 million out of reserves earlier this year to achieve the promised tax freeze.

Because of that, city staff are now busy trying to find a way to slice $6 million out of the annual cost of running the city.

Extra spending defeats budget work

But several councillors were against spending more money from city bank accounts, after withdrawing $6 million earlier this year to freeze taxes.

Several councillors argued that bringing in extra spending half way through the year cancelled all the hard work done during weeks of budget deliberations this winter.

"We agonized through that process not to come back here six months later and say that's OK, to hell with that. We'll just add more. We're just going to come back," said Ward 10 councillor Fern Cormier. "CAO go find us another $3 million."

Ward 8 Coun. Al Sizer had this to say:

"We can go to a zero per cent increase every January and then come back in July and say we need more money for this. When we have emergencies, the reserve funds are there."

The idea was defeated, with only Kirwan and Joscelyne Landry-Altmann voting for the extra road spending.

Most councillors did agree that Greater Sudbury needs to invest more in its roads, but said the time to discuss that is during budget talks this winter.