Here’s Hoping Our New Police Board Members Put The Burdens Of Ordinary Niagarians First

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Niagara’s regional council has three new representatives going to the police board who  they have a Herculean job ahead of him.

That job is getting a police budget that has, for well over a decade now, been escalating well above what many Niagara residents can expect to receive themselves in a wage or pension increase under control.

Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey, former Thorold mayor and newly elected regional councillor Henry D’Angela and the regional council’s new chairman Gary Burroughs are now heading for seats on the Niagara Police Service Board. And these three individuals – the only three on the seven-member board that are elected by the taxpayers of the region  – come in at a time when growing numbers of taxpayers are  expressing open concern and sometimes even anger over police spending.

They come to the board at a time when the regional government – responsible for the spending of about 50 per cent of Niagara residents’ property taxes – faces capital costs totaling more than $60 million for a new police headquarters in Niagara Falls and for other facilities. They also come to the board at a time when the police union has received over the past year a 9.6 per cent salary increase for its members over the next three years – more than three per cent a year at a time when Niagara is experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and many people are getting by on low or fixed incomes, and can only dream of receiving an increase like that in their pensions or wages.

There seems to be a good deal of agreement among members of the regional council that the kinds of escalating costs coming out of policing over the past decade or more are not sustainable in an economy where so many others in Niagara are struggling to make ends meet with less.

So what to do about it?

First and foremost, lets hope that Badawey, D’Angela and Burroughs go to the police board meetings with an attitude that says they are there to represent the taxpayers of this region, rather than coming back to the regional councils, as too many of their predecessors did, representing the position of the police administration. Let’s get a little more representation on behalf of the ordinary people going to work for us here.

Last but not least, let’s hope they and others on the regional council lobby the Ontario government to do something about an arbitration system that allows police administrations and unions to go to provincially appointed arbitrators and obtain whatever money they want at the expense of local municipalities and their taxpayers. This undemocratic system of defying the concerns of local municipalities around the ability of their residents to pay for policing costs well above the rate of inflation and cost of living for most others has got to be brought to an end.

So these three new police board members have one hell of a job on their hands. Contact them with your concerns around the unsustainability of escalating policing costs in this region.. Show them all the support they may need to go to those board meetings representing the taxpayers who elected them.

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