Kingston, Ont., council sets draft strategic priorities

In a city with a lot of competing priorities, it’s hard to whittle down the list.

This week, Kingston, Ont., councillors spent three days doing just that: drafting the priorities they’d like focus on during their term.

It was a long three nights for Kingston city council.

Mayor Bryan Paterson said that they landed on four main points to attack for term of office including the housing crisis, environmental stewardship, connected communities and economic development.

Coun. Brandon Tozzo said that they want to continue working with upper levels of government to whittle down the housing deficit.

“We’re trying to work with other levels of government to enhance the affordability of the housing market, to focus on increasing our supply of rent-geared to income, our supply of affordable housing,”

Countryside district Coun. Gary Oosterhof said he believes that increasing economic development in the city will directly help the housing crisis.

“We need to incentivize economic development because that will grow our tax base and allow us to do the things we really need to do,”

Both councillors said that the discussion on environmental stewardship was mostly agreed upon across the board as one of the main priorities and that they both would like to see continuation of the city’s green initiatives from the last council.

“We need to aggressively meet our climate change goals and try to cut our emissions and our environmental footprint as much as possible,” said Tozzo.

“I absolutely want us to do everything we can on the environmental front, and I think we are, we’re very responsible and we know what we have to do,” added Oosterhof.

Jeremy Milloy of Just Recovery Kingston, a local group focused on housing and environmental issues, said he likes some of what the city has done in recent years, but still wants to see more unity.

“Where the rubber’s going to hit the road is whether these priorities are unified into a strategic position that moves these things forward together,” said Milloy.

He added that he has two clear goals that he is hoping the city will pursue.

“I would like to see, in particular on the environmental front, a commitment to a 50%, by 2030, emissions reduction target, and I would like to see us get creative at bringing more of the largest emitters in the city to the table,”

Now, the draft strategic priorities agreed on by council will be sent off to city staff, who will analyze them.

Staff will bring them back to council at the end of may with some notes, and plans for the future.