{"id":32098,"date":"2022-10-21T17:46:01","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T21:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=32098"},"modified":"2022-10-21T17:46:03","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T21:46:03","slug":"aurora-votes-2022-good-governance-and-financial-management-are-focuses-for-ward-6-candidate-robert-james-fraser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/aurora-votes-2022-good-governance-and-financial-management-are-focuses-for-ward-6-candidate-robert-james-fraser\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora Votes 2022: Good governance and financial management are focuses for Ward 6 candidate Robert James Fraser"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fresh perspectives are needed at Town Hall when it comes to how taxpayer dollars are spent, says Ward 6 candidate Robert James Fraser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fraser, who works in media sales for a large nation-wide entertainment company, says after living in Aurora for nearly 30 years, he made a somewhat \u201cspontaneous\u201d decision to throw his hat into the political arena with a focus on \u201cgood governance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cResidents I have been talking to are looking for good governance,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are looking for accountability. Quite honestly, one of the big challenges is just to get municipal politics on the radar of the average Aurora resident. We know that voter participation rates for the municipal election are pretty pathetic and I\u2019m trying to bring some awareness to we all spend a fair bit of money in taxes and understanding where that money is going.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The redevelopment of Town Square is one area that has seen financial focus and, on that front, Fraser says a \u201creality check\u201d is in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re spending a ton of money on that particular development, a ton of money that is going in there from the Hydro sale that is going to go into that venture,\u201d he says, stating \u201csober second thought\u201d is needed on creating a \u201ctourist destination\u201d in the community. \u201cWhen you have Toronto on your footsteps, how realistic is that? I think there\u2019s a lot of money going into that project and is that really something the Town wanted or the Town needed?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An additional focus for Fraser is the Town\u2019s agreement with Niagara College and its Canadian Food and Wine Institute on the historic Aurora Armoury. There are a lot of unanswered questions on this front, he contends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are some things that I probably would have looked at differently from how Council has run things over the last couple of years,\u201d he says. \u201cAs someone who is not mired in the weeds and details, looking at it from the outside in, I question some of the various ways we\u2019re spending the money. I question why we have this multi-million-dollar baseball field in prime industrial lands \u2013 that\u2019s not going to generate an industrial or employment tax rate. It\u2019s a beautiful facility, but what was our rationale in putting that into our limited supply of Industrial-zoned lands? Do we need another state-of-the-art facility?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond finances, Fraser says more needs to be done to protect existing natural and green spaces for future generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just don\u2019t think we can afford to lose any more of our green spaces if we want to maintain the quality of life in this Town,\u201d he says. \u201c[I also want to look at] what we can do to bring in and attract what I call high-value employment opportunities. It\u2019s not another [restaurant] opening up, it\u2019s a semi-conductor chip manufacturer, something in high-tech, where you\u2019re bringing in $100,000 wages as opposed to $40,000 jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On all of these fronts, there is \u201csome more openness that Council needs to have with the citizenry of Aurora,\u201d says Fraser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI believe that we need to keep what is green today and figure out innovatively how, if we want to increase density\u2026 it is really a question that comes back to the people of Aurora: we\u2019re either going to gobble up green space or have some intensification. Is that multi-storey residential you want to start putting in? You\u2019re redeveloping single family housing into duplexes or fourplexes and things like that where you can put more people into the same space and reduce the cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I look at real estate prices in this Town versus what I paid when I moved in here 29 years ago and what real estate is going for today, it\u2019s mind blowing. I probably couldn\u2019t afford to live in the house I live in today had I not been here already. Could my [adult children] buy a house in Aurora? Probably not now and where do we go with affordable housing issue? It\u2019s bigger than the Town that I see the Town\u2026 zoning and intensification to have some properties that are more reasonably priced. Can you go down the whole co-op housing model and how does that work in a Town like Aurora?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to have a co-op approach where you have individuals paying market value rents or purchase prices and you have other individuals who are being subsidized\u2026 that has to come from somewhere and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessarily the citizen of Aurora subsidizing through their taxes housing. The housing affordability issue is a federal issue, it\u2019s a provincial issue. I don\u2019t think you can necessarily start to tackle it at a municipal level because you have 60-odd thousand people in Town. I just don\u2019t see that as tenable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fresh perspectives are needed at Town Hall when it comes to how taxpayer dollars are spent, says Ward 6 candidate Robert James Fraser. Fraser, who works in media sales for a large nation-wide entertainment company, says after living in Aurora for nearly 30 years, he made a somewhat \u201cspontaneous\u201d decision to throw his hat into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":32075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/2022-10-20-05.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8lI","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 11:33:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}