Londoners are gearing up to head to the polls on Oct. 24 for the municipal election as residents of the Forest City will elect their next mayor, city councillors and school board trustees.
Sixty-one candidates are running in 14 wards across the city.
But Ward 5 is set to have someone new as Coun. Maureen Cassidy announced that she will not be seeking re-election, having recently become the interim CEO of Pillar Non-Profit.
That leaves two challengers on the ballot, Conner Pierotti and Jerry Pribil.
A full list of mayoral and ward candidates can be found on the city of London’s website.
With a lot of new faces coming to the table across the wards, Global News has reached out to all those in the running and emailed a list of five questions on some of the key issues in the city, among them combating homelessness, addiction and mental health issues, affordable housing, and accessible public transit.
The responses for every candidate who replies will be shared below.
Now it’s time to meet the candidates for Ward 5.
Conner Pierotti
Q1. Over the summer, the group The Forgotten 519 put out a call to action to come up with urgent solutions to address London’s homelessness crisis. If elected, how would you tackle homelessness, addiction and mental health issues in London?
Homelessness was a top issue for Londoners in the last municipal election, and since then the situation has only gotten worse. London, due to its role as a regional centre, will always have to bear many of the burdens of the opioid epidemic and the effects of decades of neglect towards our most vulnerable from all levels of government.
While the city can’t do everything to fix this multifaceted problem, we do need to do what we can to help alleviate hardships. Having the city work directly with wraparound services, supporting unhoused populations, and to help provide funding and resources they need to do their jobs properly would be a good start.
Many of these services faced financial stresses during COVID which only worsened the homelessness crisis. Also, the city needs to encourage or get directly involved in the building of transitional forms of housing such as SRO (single room occupancy) units to get our homeless population safe and off the street ASAP.
Q2. London business owners have recently highlighted some of the economic challenges they’re facing particularly in the downtown core. What strategies do you propose to revitalize London’s downtown core to help businesses thrive?
I often liken the situation downtown that has gotten worse since COVID as the water being taken out of the ocean. We need to make sure that people who live downtown and come downtown for work or shopping feel safe in the neighbourhood. London has a real lack of transitional housing and the pressures of COVID have only increased the need for it. That is the first step in any serious plan to clean up and revitalize this city’s core.
Q3. Affordability in the housing and rental markets is the most pressing issue for many Londoners. If elected, what changes would you push for to ease the burden on Londoners when it comes to the cost of living?
We need to take real action to get London out of this housing crisis. I hear from folks on the door every day who are afraid for their kids and the next generation. People in the city who are working hard and contributing should be able to afford to live well. We need to work with the province on this goal, but we also need to find the things London can do to make life better for people who live here.
Currently developers are more attracted to building homes mostly on the highest end of the scale due to how development charges are done in London. It needs to be more expensive in development charges to build larger homes, and easier and cheaper to build medium to smaller homes and developments that encourage that “missing middle in housing.” Some other examples would be ending exclusionary zoning, implementing a RentSafe program to help out renters, and bringing derelict and vacant buildings back into our housing stock through bylaw enforcement and vacancy taxation.
Q4. London is in the process of building three legs of bus rapid transit, but challenges remain for the north and west end of the city. What is your vision for the next phase of public transit in the city?
I am a firm believer that rapid transit lines help out everyone in the community. Those who live near rapid transit projects usually see a permanent increase in the value of their homes and it makes the city a more livable place for everyone.
The original plan for the northern leg of the transit line was to go up Richmond Street, through the university, and then onto Masonville. This leg got axed due to the concerns of the university and those living next to the stretch of Richmond, south of the river heading towards downtown. While this would be the ideal route, a northern leg needs to happen sooner rather than later.
I would be open to looking at alternative routes that use Western Road instead of Richmond Street, if the ridership numbers and strategic planning makes sense. Ideally, though while BRT is good, I would prefer a Light Rail option as LRT systems are usually superior to BRT. Especially if we plan on doing density intensification along these transit corridors and want to encourage more people to start commuting using London Transit.
Q5. What is your vision for London in the next 10 years and how do we get there?
I do not think that London’s high growth rate is going to slow down in the long term future of this city. As climate change gets worse we will continue to have people immigrating to Canada and London will remain an attractive city to settle down in. We need to start thinking of London as a city in transition and now is the time to make the hard decisions of what our city will look like in the future.
To do this, we build proper transit infrastructure, work with our school boards and post secondary institutions to maintain a high quality of education, implement creative new ideas on urban development, and have strong leadership to carry out our vision. We can make London not only a model for future sustainable city practices, but one of the most livable cities in Canada.
Jerry Pribil
Q1. Over the summer, the group The Forgotten 519 put out a call to action to come up with urgent solutions to address London’s homelessness crisis. If elected, how would you tackle homelessness, addiction and mental health issues in London?
I have lived with my family in Masonville area for years, but currently we live above my downtown business on Carling Street. I spend my free time, when my restaurant is not open, interacting with our homeless population on regular basis and also volunteering with street-level aid agency 519Pursuit. I know, likely better than most the depth of this problem – yet at city hall, we fail to label the correlated problems of mental health challenges, addiction, and homelessness as a crisis of the highest order. Let’s declare this a crisis, and then let’s staff it as a crisis.
The city’s senior leadership team spent months during the early days of COVID marshalling city-wide response from its Emergency Operations Centre in Byron. We need that level of attentiveness to this problem, and to fund and staff it accordingly.
This is a multi-level government problem. The province, through the Ministries of Health (mental health and addictions supports) and Children, Community and Social Services (stabilization, income, housing supports) need to be at the table with their funding envelopes for operating budgets.
Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Plan (ODSP) allowances need to be adjusted for today’s market rate shelter and living expense to keep those currently housed from becoming homeless. The federal government and its agencies can help with capital funding for permanent housing supports.
The size of this problem is a crisis. 300 plus individual encampments, 2,000 people and with 10 per cent of that number having high acuity mental health and or addiction intersections.
Q2. London business owners have recently highlighted some of the economic challenges they’re facing particularly in the downtown core. What strategies do you propose to revitalize London’s downtown core to help businesses thrive?
Full disclosure, I own and operate a business in the downtown; Marienbad Restaurant and Chaucer’s Pub, and I am also a director of the Downtown London Business Association. We have sunk a lot of capital dollars in the downtown, and frankly, we’re grateful. The solution though isn’t more capital works.
We cannot revitalize the downtown without addressing the lived experience safety issues, and perceptions, of people living in, working in, or visiting the core. We are hearing of major downtown employers whose temporary work-from-home staff won’t come back to their downtown offices post-COVID. Stores with locked doors in business hours and barricaded windows. Individuals experiencing homelessness are themselves feeling unsafe in the core, especially overnight, and are moving outward into adjacent residential neighbourhoods.
I support the London Police Services request for an additional 52 frontline police officers and expanding the COAST program.
We need to re-write the Core Area Action Plan (CAAP) which is currently out for public consultation now. If we are reporting 49 per cent completed and 49 per cent on track in the delivery of the current CAAP, then I think we can say our action plan isn’t addressing the correct things, as our problem has only worsened.
We need to adjust our Community Incentive Plans to reward developers to convert un- and under-used commercial properties to mixed-use residential, leveraging the heritage-built environment assets we have. We need to time infrastructure works so that the downtown has a regenerative break from the constant construction that makes visiting difficult.
Lastly, we also need to be respectful of the economic choices non-core residents currently might wish to make, and that they might have a bit of ‘core fatigue’. For Ward 5, our downtown has really become the Masonville commercial node; movie theatres, entertainment options, great restaurants, banking, drug and grocery stores, retail, a transit hub. For our traditional core to compete with that convenience, it needs to be on an even footing – especially from a perceived and real safety and security perspective – so that when people do come down to visit our great anchor amenities like Budweiser Gardens or the Covent Garden Market, they’re pleasantly surprised and will come down again.
Q3. Affordability in the housing and rental markets is the most pressing issue for many Londoners. If elected, what changes would you push for to ease the burden on Londoners when it comes to the cost of living?
What are the basic determinants of housing cost? Generally, it’s PITI – principal, interest, taxes, and insurance.
A municipality has only a few levers in this regard. Increasing the speed to housing supply off all types and at all price points is one – which means re-engineering the development approvals process. From initial pre-meet to building permit issuance, it can often take more than 10 years to bring housing online, and first occupancies can be another two years off from that. We need to mechanize the process as much as possible, tighten timing between gates, and we need to ensure that we staff development approvals teams commensurate with the city’s population growth and housing demands. We need to work with the development industry and our planning groups to align supply coming on stream with demand.
The other is taxes. We need to lead with responsible budgeting, which may result in difficult trade-offs, always being mindful of taxpayers’ ability to pay. This is more important than ever during a period of inflation that hasn’t been seen in 40 years and with a potential recession coming at us.
Q4. London is in the process of building three legs of bus rapid transit, but challenges remain for the north and west end of the city. What is your vision for the next phase of public transit in the city?
What are the key underpinnings of bus rapid transit? Frequency and reliability – meaning, the ability to catch a bus — without looking at your watch, an app, or an old-school paper schedule, and with minimal wait. The LTC has long had their own bus rapid transit concept developed under former general manager Larry Ducharme – minus the dedicated lanes and road infrastructure updates.
LTC’s current 90-series express buses are at the core of that. Increasing frequencies, routings, and carrying capacities from the downtown loop north to Masonville and from the downtown to the west, continuing past Wonderland and onward to Riverbend is a near-term, and achievable solution. Longer term we can look at the Rapid Transit Corridor Place Types in the London Plan and look at solving some of the built environment constraint issues on the west and north routings.
In Ward 5, planned intersection improvements at Richmond/Windermere/Western and Richmond and Fanshawe Park will help to alleviate rush hour congestion, and city-wide rollout of TIMMS (Transportation Intelligent Mobility Management System) will reduce intersection delays, manage incidents, and ensure shorter travel times for transit users and drivers.
Also, we need to recognize that PSE students on tuition-bundled passes greatly shape demand and LTC service hours and represent about 60 per cent of the current ridership of the LTC. They are a very important stakeholder, but the rest of London’s public transportation needs must be considered and funded in a sustainable manner with frequencies that encourage ridership, and deliver last-mile routing solutions that service our industrial, and other under-served areas.
Q5. What is your vision for London in the next 10 years and how do we get there?
10 years is a long time, and a councillor’s term is only four, and If elected, I am only one vote out of fifteen.
My vision is to work with my political colleagues, city staff, and my fellow Londoners to make London a great place to live, work, and play. That is, a city where our people are proud to live, where working and investing here is a smart choice, and where there’s always something for our families to explore.
Near term how we get there is pragmatic incrementalism, as we wrestle with the dragons of inflation and control upward pressure on the levy.
Mid to longer term, we will need official plan updates to reflect our 2016 – 2021 population spike and the realities of a post-COVID London. We have a solid capital plan that is laid out on a ten-year horizon – we need to grow London’s community infrastructure in a responsible and sustainable way, recognizing those under-forecasted growth rates.
And lastly, we need the courage to admit that we have — and most certainly will — make mistakes. As a former footballer, I’m a big believer in teamwork and the power of teams. Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” If at the end of 10 years, we’re working together, I will be happy.
— questions by Global News’ Jaclyn Carbone and Maya Reid.
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