I want to thank Deputy Mayor O'Leary for bringing a motion.
This is democracy and this is the way it's supposed to work.
We're not supposed to send emails and have a discussion. We're supposed to put a motion on the table, have the discussion right here in this room, vote it up, vote it down. This is the way it's supposed to work and I thank him for doing that because he stuck his neck out.

As I'm sitting here Brian, I can remember – Richard is going to remember this – I can remember a hundred years ago there was a hockey coach on council named McComb who threw out an idea at a council meeting about moving city hall down to the harbour and it was a brainstorming thing at the time and the grief that Councillor McComb went through at the time in the public was quite unfortunate and quite similar to some of the whacks that you've taken.

This is how we're supposed to consider things. This is how we're supposed to think about things. This is how we're supposed to move ideas forward and put the out on the table.

Council voted for it at the budget meeting simply to look at it.

I try to start everything with “How do we grow the City?” That's my thought. I believe that we have to grow our tax base and our assessment base to survive. To compete with others. Frankly. But to be able to provide the services that we want to afford. To be able to afford some of the housing that we want to afford. We have to grow our tax base. To do that, we have to attract people and I'm not sure that charging for parking and starting to be less attractive to people to move here, come and visit, fills my idea or belief or basic principle that I want to grow the City.

Growing that assessment base is a lot more than just growing. You know we talk about retention and..I can't think of what the study was...attraction and retention...part of it is retention. When we've got commercial businesses that are being reassessed and we're losing value on those because there isn't enough people going through the doors and the value of those assessments drops, then that hurts us. We've got to build a lot of houses to replace the value, assessment and taxes that we're getting from some of those commercial properties that are being adjusted through appeals. Part of that is trying to attract more people from across Grey-Bruce and Simcoe, Huron even, to come to Owen Sound to do their shopping to come – I know for a fact that people are coming from as far away as Goderich and Huron just to get their chemo treatments at the hospital and that's an attraction.

I'm all for doing a doing study, but at the end of the day, am I going to want to support the decision that may come out of this study, and I don't think that I am so I'm not in favour of doing the study if we're not going to get to the point that I'm going to vote in favour of it. So my thinking is that – everything we do, there's consequences, from every decision we make and some of them we think of and some of them we don't think of – some of them are like throwing a rock into the water, it's a ripple effect, that you hit something on the way out that you don't think about so, it's not going to matter how I vote, if I get to vote depending on the numbers on it, but those are my thoughts.