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Letter: Cutting services and salaries at New Westminster City Hall? Not so fast

Why pay more property tax? Well, who needs a full-time fire department or traffic lights that work all the time?
City hall - Nov. 2021
Cutting services in New Westminster? Maybe not quite so fast, this letter writer says.

Editor:

Re: New Westminster needs to cut city staff, lower salaries, Letters to the editor, Dec. 6

Much like Bill, I'm a taxpayer, so I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts. I have a lot in common with Bill, mostly that I don't understand how the city works, I love to make baseless assumptions about how it works, and I agree that cutting back municipal services to 1950s levels for a city that has grown substantially in the past 70 years would probably have zero downsides. So what if the fire department doesn't respond to fires on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do we really need the traffic lights to work all the time?

I'm not a homeowner like Bill, so unfortunately I don't know what it's like to have my cost of living go up, except when my rent increases every year, but I think it's worth it to hobble the city so that he doesn't have to pay a bit more in property taxes on the house that has only increased in value since he bought it.

I think it's a real shame that the city doesn't get policy ideas from the opinion section of the New Westminster Record, because the thought of making city employees do the job of four people couldn't possibly backfire.

Corey Taylor, New Westminster