Article content
Woodstock city council isn’t on board with a recommendation to allow students to ride public transit for free next month.
In a 4-3 vote, council dismissed the estimated $35,000 promotion to allow high school students and younger youth to ride for free on Woodstock’s public transit in November.
The recommendation was made by a mayor’s task force and the funds would have come from a community and social well-being reserve fund.
Article content
Mayor Jerry Acchione said the task force identified “youth as one of (its) focuses this year.”
But so far none of the $150,000 in the reserve fund has been used on youth. The fund is down to $50,000 after council’s decision to dedicate $100,000 on cleaning up homeless encampments in the city.
A report last month said there are a total of 44 active and abandoned encampments in the city.
At Thursday’s meeting, two councillors raised concerns that the remaining $50,000 in the reserve fund was better spent on continuing to clean up Woodstock’s encampments.
Coun. Deb Tait was among the politicians who voted against spending the funds on free transit for youth, saying there’s “still 34 homeless encampments” in Woodstock that should be addressed.
“My concern is I think the focus should still be these encampments and the homeless issue,” Tait said. “It is going to cost a lot of money to clean these up.”
Another councillor who doubted whether funding free transit outweighed cleaning up the nearly three dozen Woodstock encampments was Connie Lauder.
“I really question doing this at this time when we’re short of funds to clean up the encampments,” she said.
Share this article in your social network
