Stand For Change:
1) Lowering property Taxes; Van Damme will ensure more transparency with fiscal spending. Van Damme will start conducting a root cause analysis on where we have been bleeding the St. Albert tax payers and put a stop to pork barrel type spending. We, as St. Albert taxpayers, need to start thinking outside the box at attracting additional revenues to the city without having to continue to raise property taxes, year after year. You will find Van Damme’s ideas for change are all focused around lowering taxes.
2) Attracting commercial development; Van Damme will ensure that we attract commercial development. With the Anthony Henday and Western extension, the volume of traffic commuting into the city of St. Albert will continue to grow to be in the millions of vehicles each year. We need to ensure that the zoning for commercial development directs this traffic into St. Albert businesses, and by doing so attracting further development on the new commercial zones. Doing so, will help support and sustain our local economy. St. Albert up until now has focused on residential development. It’s now time to start ensuring that St. Albert doesn't make the mistake of missing out on a big opportunity for success, by having more commercial development. With this in mind, Van Damme will introduce additional non-residential tax revenue into St. Albert, therefore, lowering the dependency on St. Albert property taxes;
3) Making Servus Place Profitable; Van Damme has aspirations of making Servus Place work for St. Albert, turning the chapter from a fiscal loss year after year, into a profitable business. By doing this, Van Damme will network and attract more venues, events, and sports tournaments. He will find ways of increasing traffic to Servus Place by initiating city organized parades, festivals, and outdoor markets from St. Albert Servus Place flagship. We need to start thinking of Servus Place as the Rexall Place of St. Albert, this includes campaigning hockey leagues to bring a professional hockey team to St. Albert, such as the Western Hockey League, and still continue to provide fan support to our St. Albert Steel Junior ‘A’ club. Van Damme believes we need to concentrate on key items that will bring revenue and profitability to Servus Place, therefore lowering the dependency on St. Albert tax payers to foot the bill for running Servus Place into a deficit;
4) Adopting emerging technologies; Van Damme will ensure St. Albert starts adopting emerging technologies, putting St. Albert on the map as a leader for other cities and towns to follow. By using the internet as a forum to gather opinions and by conducting advanced polling on key issues facing council, we can achieve greater transparency for St. Albert residents. St. Albert taxpayers have the ability to use visual aid technologies, such as YouTube, to view city council meetings, thereby opening the floor for taking St. Albert's questions through the answering of emails, instant messages, and video messaging. Van Damme will turn St. Albert into a WiFi hotspot to support the growing need for high speed internet and a new era of portable WiFi electronics used in day-to-day life and virtualize the city's computer systems saving precious tax payers dollars. These changes will keep St. Albert tax payers in touch with council and the hard issues facing St. Albert. The resulting changes will make it more effective and efficient for St. Albert taxpayers to bring their ideas forward to council, allowing 360 degree decisions on behalf of the St. Albert taxpayers. Having council implement these ideas, will save money by streamlining the city's technology gaining better returns on investment for St. Albert and its residents.
5) Saving St. Anne Street; Van Damme believes that the permanent closure of St. Anne Street will have a negative impact on downtown business. Although, we do need downtown walkways, similar to Church Hill Square in Edmonton; we need to be smarter about how we do it. For example: closing down St. Anne Street only on the weekends, introducing licenses’ for street vendors to sell their products, which in turn will attract walking traffic to St. Anne Street thereby, bringing more exposure to the downtown businesses. Achieving this will put dollars back into our local economy, which, for St. Albert taxpayers, means more money in their pockets to spend.
