I decided to send the following letter to the City of Victoria at teh following email address snowclearing@victoria.ca
So how do you go about getting sidewalks shoveled? As in what needs to be done so that you will ticket the people that have not shoveled?
The majority of properties in my neighbourhood, Burnside Gorge, have made no effort to shovel the sidewalk. It is bad governance to have a by-law and then not enforce it, it only encourages a disrespect of government and civil society.
I can send you a list of houses, apartments/condos in my neighbourhood that are now 48 hours overdue in shoveling. Would you like me to list them all and send you pictures? I would be happy to see you ticket them all, 1000 tickets like that would bring in an extra $150,000 to the City making my tax burden lower.
I will start taking the pictures and documenting the properties this morning, I assume that you can still ticket them next week after the snow is gone.
If you are not planning on doing any enforcement, I would like to send a bill for shoveling City property to you. It is only fair that you pay people that actual do the work for the City to keep sidewalks clear if you are not going to enforce the bylaw.
yours
Bernard von Schulmann
I encourage others to register complaints.
In Saanich at stormevents@saanich.ca
In Esquimalt at http://www.esquimalt.ca/contactForms/MLetham.aspx
3 comments:
This seems a little harsh, I happen to have been at the council meeting where this bylaw was voted in for Saanich, and it was made very clear that it was to be enforced with extreme discretion. In a city that gets snow so rarely some time should be allowed for the public to become educated about the new bylaw. Also, to buy snow shovels and salt.
If there is no enforcement of a by-law how do you expect people to take it seriously?
I can almost accept the selfish people on side streets, but it is the businesses and apartments/condos that really bother me.
Im not sure on your angle of attacking this problem. But Yes it is a problem. I being a ex lettercarrier dealt with this for 35 yrs here in Victoria. I can tell you that on average when it snowed maybe 20 people out of 400 shoveled sidewalks on their own property to let safe passage of a lettercarrier by. What was interesting, was that some shoveled driveways to get the car out but left the sidewalk to their front door unshoveled and trampled.
Good luck but dont lose sleep over getting people of Victoria to change. After all this is the banana belt of Canada
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