Thank you very much, everybody, for being here. As you know, this is very personal for me, because this is my home. This is my riding.
Mayor Read, you mentioned the report from 2010. We've seen reports time and time again, saying “Let's reduce this. Let's fix this”, but we never seem to actually gain the traction. We never seem to get ahead of the curve. I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that the stigma is huge. It stops us from saying, “Well, we don't care about those guys,” or “They're not important, so we're not going to worry about them.”
I'm an operations guy. When I see a problem, I want to go and solve it. My hands are tied because there are too many obstacles, intergovernmental obstacles.
Mayor Read, can you talk to us about the challenges that a small, emerging city like ours is facing in moving forward?