Mayoral candidate Vito Sgro is running a campaign based on a stack of falsehoods and oversimplifications about the most significant public investment in decades. His claims should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

The billion-dollar Light Rail Transit (LRT) funding commitment is not a blank cheque we can spend on whatever we want.

Sgro's central campaign pledge is to cancel the LRT plan and use the $1 billion in committed LRT funding for other infrastructure projects.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said he would allow the money currently earmarked for Hamilton's LRT to be spent on other "approved" projects, but has not said what kinds of projects would be approved or even what the criteria would be.

If we cancel LRT and go back to the drawing board, it will take years to develop a new plan. There is no way of even knowing what party will be in power by the time we complete our new plan, let alone what their investment priorities might be.

We would be trading a solid funding commitment backed by a decade of detailed planning, robust expert recommendations and binding legal agreements for a cheap campaign slogan.

We don't have to choose between LRT and the BLAST network.

Sgro is counting on people not understanding that the B-Line LRT is literally the "B" in BLAST. The BLAST network is a system of five rapid transit lines to be built in phases: B-Line first, followed by the north-south A-line, the Mohawk T-Line, the Rymal S-Line and the Waterdown L-line.

The City is already increasing bus service on the other lines to prepare for the upgrade to rapid transit. Sgro's plan is to keep adding bus service but cancel the actual rapid transit upgrade.

This is nonsensical. We can't finish the BLAST network if we don't start, and the B-Line already has the ridership and development potential for rapid transit today.

We don't have to choose between LRT and infrastructure.

LRT is infrastructure, and most of the capital cost goes directly to construct new roadway, bridge, water, sewer and transportation facilities for decades to come. This Provincial investment frees up local infrastructure capital and operating dollars that we can reinvest in other parts of the city — including bus service to underserved areas.

LRT also raises the traffic carrying capacity of the route so that adding people living and working along the corridor won't produce gridlock.

A one-time hit of money won't fix our infrastructure.

Hamilton has an infrastructure maintenance backlog over $3 billion, growing by almost $200 million a year. Sgro wants to divert LRT capital to chip away at the backlog. But as soon as the money was spent, the backlog would resume growing if we do nothing to fix the reason we have a growing deficit in the first place.

For decades, most of Hamilton's growth has been low-density sprawl that requires expensive infrastructure. Every subdivision increases our obligations faster than our revenues, digging the hole deeper.

We need to grow our tax base with new infill development on already-serviced land that doesn't expand our infrastructure life cycle costs. LRT lets us do this by attracting new developments along the line. It's why LRT has been central to our strategic growth plans for the past decade.

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We won't attract LRT-oriented development without LRT.

Sgro notes Hamilton is already attracting infill development and claims we will continue to get that development if we cancel LRT. Talk about short-sighted! We're attracting this development precisely because LRT is going ahead.

Jason Thorne, the City's General Manager of Planning and Economic Development, recently reported, "There's a strong correlation between development interest we're seeing and the LRT project."

Several developers have already said they decided to confirm their projects because of LRT. If we cancel it now, we will pay a huge price in lost investment and credibility.

We can't fix transit without fixing area rating.

Hamilton charges different property tax rates for transit depending on where people live, and parts of the city with lower rates receive less service. In some cases, people living on opposite sides of the same street pay different rates.

Any increase to a lower-rated area is charged entirely to local ratepayers rather than pooled across everyone. As a result, it is politically difficult to add transit in underserved areas.

But Sgro says he won't even touch area rating before he realigns the city's wards again — right after the city just completed a long, challenging ward boundary review that went to the Ontario Municipal Board. This tells us he's not serious about fixing transit.

Sgro's platform is an anti-vision for Hamilton. It's narrow-minded, short-sighted wedge politics that sacrifices the most city's most transformative opportunity on the altar of cynicism and resentment.