Posts Tagged: lawrence heights


25
Feb 11

Horse trading at city hall

CitySlikr — whose coverage of this week’s events on Twitter was awesome — details a small story about Councillor Josh Colle from yesterday’s session:

Josh Colle, one of the freshman councillors and political moderates, voted with the mayor on every budget item save for the Parks and Forestry and Library budgets. That’s not blind adherence but pretty solid support. In turn, when Councillor Colle’s motion came to a vote, a motion, let me add, that bore no financial impact on the budget, it just asked for a report on front yard parking fees and was shepherded through with the help of Councillor Cesar Palacio, a councillor plucked out of well-deserved obscurity owing solely to his slavish devotion to the mayor, it lost by one. You know who voted against it? Mayor Ford.

When the results were announced, catcalls could be heard directed at Councillor Colle. “They’re not your friends, Josh!”

via Notes On A Budget Debate From The Peanut Gallery « All Fired Up In The Big Smoke.

Two things about Councillor Josh Colle, who took over Howard Moscoe’s old ward in Eglinton-Lawrence. First, there’s this interesting story Josh Matlow tells about the time, soon after the election, that he met with Nick Kouvalis. Kouvalis, thinking Matlow was Colle, started trying to butter him with tales of his father — Liberal MPP Mike Colle — before trying to get him to agree to vote with the mayor on the budget.

Second, there’s the small matter of probably the only election promise Ford has broken since he took office. During the campaign, he promised to stop the proposed redevelopment of Lawrence Heights. He even yelled into a megaphone about stopping it. But at the end of December, he declared that he wouldn’t actively work against the project, saying that he didn’t want to step on the local councillor’s toes. That councillor? Josh Colle.

I don’t profess to know if any of this, or what CitySlikr noted above, is related. But it does paint an interesting (if faint) picture of the kind of horse trading that seems to go on between councillors and the mayor’s office.