Candidate Interview: Dave Bronconnier

By Katy Anderson

<1. What do you think the big issues in this election are?
2. How are you planning to address the city’s crime problem?
3. What can the city do to ease the crunch on affordable housing?
4. What transportation infrastructure need would you address first?
5. What separates you from the other candidates?

1. It’s about focusing on quality of life improvements and where this city is going. From my perspective, it’s building a city that’s going to be ready to accommodate the next wave of growth. Over the 30 to 40 years Calgary will grow and double in size to 2 million people. That means investing back into the infrastructure, whether that be sewage and waste treatment facilities, upgrading our water plants to accommodate that growth, annexing land, which ties into our land use policies, with your transportation policies with of course your financial plan.

2. If you look at crime in Calgary today, Calgary still remains a very safe city. The crime stats are and continue to decline. In the last three years, crime statistics have gone down, on average, three per cent in every category. We have had a very bad year in terms of a rash of a number of homicides in a very tight time frame. Calgary remains one of the safest cities in North America, unless you’re involved in two activities; if you’re involved in a gang, or you’re involved in drugs.

3. Most people are unaware that the city of Calgary is the largest residential landlord in the city. We own over 8,000 units of affordable housing and when you look at that, that’s a very significant investment into affordable housing. But in addition to that, we’re moving forward on a number of strategies and our goal as a city is to create 200 affordable housing units every year for the next four years.

4. The LRT. We try to have a very balanced transportation plan. Eighty per cent of people use roads and 20 per cent use Transit, and we’re disproportionately putting more than 50 per cent of our budget into Transit-related projects. The priority for our community is the expansion of the Light Rail Transit system. And so thus with the $930 million announcement that I tabled two weeks ago would call for the construction of a new line of the LRT, which would be the west leg of the LRT, which has been planned since 1978 but again there’s been insufficient funding of which to build that piece of infrastructure. And then we would expand the two existing lines.

5. I think I’ve got a six-year history of public services, leading our community and focusing on the issues Calgarians hold near and dear. Issues of transportation, recreation, affordable housing, the environment, emergency services and more. Being able to stand up for Calgarians when need be, and deliver on the areas they think are a priority.