Comment 38159

By nobrainer (registered) | Posted February 18, 2010 at 13:56:40

Linc/Redhill cost us $500,000,000. Canada Bread - the first business to locate in the RedHill Business Park (nice new name for Glanbrook BP) - will have 300 jobs. We could take the money we spent on the highway and pay those workers $50,000 a year -- for the next 33 years.

Course there will probably be other businesses open in RedHill BP sooner or later. Maybe if we're lucky it'll work out to a wash: dollar for dollar, public spending to private wages, on new jobs created because of the highway. Yay freemarket capitalism.

On the other side of the ledger the city loses money with every new suburban house built because of RedHill (like the billion dollar Summit Park, whose owners the DeSantis developers broke the law to make sure DiIanni had enough money to run his winning 2003 campaign).

And all those people are stuck paying whatever it costs to run there cars, since you'll never have good public transit with that low density. (We're still in a recession but oil is trading for $80 bucks a barrel.) And we're stuck breathing all the air pollution and paying publicly for the extra healthcare costs when people have heart attacks, asthma, emphysema etc. from the pollution.

And we're so broke from paying for RedHill that we can't afford other capital expenditures that might have a better ROI and encourage more sustainable lifestyles.

So yeah, AWESOME investment by the city. :P

P.S. All the stuff I just wrote is EXACTLY the stuff people who opposed RedHill were writing about ten years ago.

Fixing Hamilton's problems is a no-brainer

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