Council eyes crossing guards at 15 busy intersections

When council holds its second meeting this week, it will have a number of important matters to consider — including whether to find $54,000 in the city's multi-billion coffers for crossing guards.

There are 15 intersections in Ottawa that children use so heavily to get to school that they warrant crossing guards.

But the previous council didn't fund them, even though the cost to pay for those crossing guards for the current school year was a mere $177,089.

In an operating budget that tops $3 billion, the amount needed to fund crossing guards is the equivalent of a rounding error.

That point was made by local media in the run-up to last fall's municipal election.

At the Oct. 10 council meeting —the  final one of the previous term — outgoing Kanata North Coun. Marianne Wilkinson asked city staff to look into how they might be funded.

Possible solution

The previous council could not "pre-commit" funds for the 2019 budget, Wilkinson wrote in what would be her last direction to council.

But she also noted that if elected officials waited until the budget process, "the delay until that time, together with the time it takes to find additional guards, would mean that none of these 15 crossing guards would be provided until September 2019."

The solution being recommended by the treasurer is simple: fund 15 new crossing guards from the so-called "tax stabilization fund" — the city's main reserve fund — from January to March 2019, at a cost of $54,000.

The money to pay for the crossing guards for the rest of the school year can then be included in the 2019 budget, which this year will be approved in late March.

If the council votes in favour of the money, which is expected, it will be Wilkinson's final victory in her career-long push for greater pedestrian safety, especially for school children.

Pedestrian advocate

One of her early victories as the first mayor of Kanata in the 1970s was to convince the provincial government to cover half the cost of a pedestrian overpass to get kids across the Queensway, since they were running across the highway to get to school.

The Queensway in the 1970s wasn't what it is now in terms of lanes and speeds and number of cars, but it was still busy.

The bridge was appealed by "a couple of men who didn't think it was fiscally responsible," Wilkinson once said.

She won by running out to a local tennis court at a break in the appeal board proceedings and dragging moms and their kids into the room to tell the arbitrator how important the bridge was.

During the 2010-2014 term of council, Wilkinson was chair of the transportation committee and moved money around in that department's budget in order to fund more crossing guards, a move that annoyed Mayor Jim Watson at the time.

Council will meet to vote on crossing guard funding — as well as who'll be on which committee, and whether to use a 2019 draft budget that assumes a three per cent tax increase — at Ottawa City Hall on Wednesday.