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The ACE Plan
Nick's platform is called the ACE Plan, standing for Affordability, Community, and Engagement. These three areas will be his priority if elected to Council.
Affordability
- Create a Public Wealth Fund holding company to manage the city's vacant lots and commercial property, just like how Enwin manages our utilities.
- Improve Windsor's financial transparency measures. Adopt practices from other Canadian (and especially Ontarian) cities that get higher grades on financial transparency.
- Maintain the Auditor General's office with the operational independence they need to properly fulfill their role.
- Review the city's departmental budgets to see where resources from the existing budgets could be redistributed within the departments for better outcomes.
- Continue to lobby the federal and provincial governments for financial support, grants, uploading of infrastructure such as the EC Row, and collaboration on projects when appropriate.
Community
- Continue the work on existing projects and in good time. Some that are especially relevant to Riverside include: The Riverside Vista Improvement Project, the Reaume Park Peace Fountain replacement, the Sewer and Coastal Flood Protection Master Plan, the Sandpoint Beach Park Master Plan, and the Peche Island Restoration Project.
- Keep our community safe! Proper after-hours lighting for our streets and parks, including repairing the lamplights along Wyandotte.
- Maintain our current city-operated pest control program.
- Reduce homelessness by supporting wraparound services such as job and addiction counselling and working with community partners on cost efficient methods. It will not solve anything to simply build more units when the City Administrative claims that there are enough existing units to house the current homeless population. We need to address the root causes of why they are choosing not to occupy those units.
- Support programs focused on protecting residents such as the new Windsor Police anti-human trafficking campaign.
- Better traffic calming measures in the face of the fatalities and many collisions we've seen this year. Windsor's Vision Zero policy is a program to have all planned traffic calming measures implemented by 2035. Nick has also heard requests for more stop signs, speed traps, curbs, and crosswalks with accessibility features at the doors which may not be part of Vision Zero, and he is keeping track of these requests from our residents.
- Implement an official heat strategy for the city in preparation for next summer.
- Preparedness for dangerous smog from northern forest fires by having surplus face masks at community centres. Investigate implementing an Amber Alert-style warning system for smog and dangerous air conditions.
- Work with the federal government to build a weather station in Essex so that we have advanced warning for dangerous storms and tornados. Storm preparation should also include more proactive removal of hollowed out trees at high risk of falling down and working with the owners of older homes to make sure their roofs have hurricane ties.
Engagement
- Our elected officials should keep in touch with residents year round, and residents should know what City Council is doing on their behalf. If elected Nick will maintain his website and social media with frequent updates on community and council business. Nick will include a 'suggestion box' on his website for improvements that residents would like to see.
- Beyond the once-a-year councillors' public ward reports, Nick will hold more frequent and casual ward get-togethers open to the public.
- Nick will knock on doors even in non-election years to seek out public opinion with residents who might otherwise not know how to be heard by city officials or who might be too busy to come before council.
- Nick is opposed to how often in-camera (private and behind closed doors) city council meetings have been happening. Unless there is a very specific reason requiring privacy, city council meetings should be in public in the council chambers, open to the public as well as recorded and available online.