Why Vote for Chris Oram in City Council Election?

   Platform Highlights:

• Rebuild capital reserves rather than using them to offset taxes.

• Examine what other municipalities are doing to stimulate and expand growth - (Grants, Strategic Borrowing, Smarter Financial Planning, Innovative thinking for the Future).

• Improve infrastructure maintenance, reliability, and expansion to support existing industry, and encourage new investment.

• Enhance Sarnia's efforts to attract new business/industry.

• Community consultation to reduce controversy.

• Apply clear forward-looking approaches to issues like the unhoused, supportive housing and all the involved social issues that require cooperation between all levels of government to address.

• Investigate the best strategy for enacting new zoning by-laws to address homeless shelters and supportive housing.

• Ensure issues such as open drug use and the loitering and littering that go along with it are addressed by the police service.

• Use measured austerity to stabilize long-term finances (No more "Zero Debt" illusion).

• Protect frontline services while maintaining sustainable budgets.

• Advocate for downtown revitalization, and other such commercial areas in the city

• Encourage affordable new housing.

• Honesty: Being upfront that past councils' practices of working towards "zero debt" and using reserves to soften tax increases are in reality liabilities that will result in future debt and hard choices about taxes.

The list is long, but:

The difficulty of a goal should never diminish the ambition to achieve it.