Safety as a Municipal Priority: Real Action, Clear Funding & Local Accountability
Empowering local response, protecting neighborhood corridors, and delivering tangible municipal safety, without endless studies or tax hikes.
Public safety in Prince George cannot be solved by pushing responsibility down the line, waiting on provincial policy shifts, or burying simple issues under endless municipal committee studies. While long-term social challenges require broader solutions, local business owners, property managers, and residents need immediate, visible support on the ground today.
Security isn’t just about reacting to crime after it happens; it is about maintaining visible order, deterring property damage, and ensuring civic spaces remain safe, clean, and accessible for everyone in our community.
Core Objectives & Action Plan
- Reclaim Civic & Park Infrastructure: Direct municipal enforcement and camera integration specifically toward high-priority public assets, securing public parkades (leveraging existing fiber optics), transit hubs, civic facilities, and green spaces so residents can use city infrastructure without safety concerns.
- Direct Business & Property Security Relief: Shift the city’s focus toward immediate, practical assistance for commercial corridors dealing with repeat vandalism and trespass, prioritizing rapid cleanup and proactive physical presence over bureaucratic delays.
- Streamline Civic Oversight: Eliminate overlapping municipal committee studies and push decision-making authority back to street-level enforcement officers who know where immediate intervention is needed.
- Operationalizing Practical Security: Directly integrate and support the Practical Street Security Framework (Pillar 2), ensuring our new CSO unit and commercial camera networks have full municipal administrative backing to execute daily operations effectively.
- Insource Municipal Monitoring & Eliminate Contract Waste: Transition city facility alarm and video monitoring away from expensive, out-of-town contractors and bring it directly in-house. By utilizing our own municipal fiber assets and integrating response directly with our local CSO unit, we eliminate third-party profit margins, save thousands in taxpayer dollars, and ensure zero lag in local response time.
- Local Network Resilience & Emergency Uptime: Eliminate reliance on Lower Mainland monitoring hubs that leave local infrastructure vulnerable during regional network outages or natural disasters. Keeping video surveillance and monitoring local ensures Prince George’s safety network stays online and fully operational, no matter what happens down south.
How It Gets Funded (Without Raising Taxes)
Tangible security solutions do not require burdening taxpayers with new municipal levies. Pillar 3 relies on smarter allocation of current revenues:
- Cutting Redundant Administrative Overhead: Redirect funds away from performative municipal consulting contracts, external studies, and overlapping administrative positions directly into operational enforcement on the street.
- Leveraging Existing Infrastructure & Grants: Maximize existing municipal assets, such as fiber optic drops at civic parkades and facilities, while aggressively capturing provincial and federal public safety and community infrastructure grants.
- Proactive Prevention Savings: Reducing recurring municipal costs associated with constant public property vandalism, parkade repair, and continuous cleanup yields direct operational savings that feed straight back into sustaining local safety operations.
- Insourcing Third-Party Contracts: Ending costly monitoring and surveillance contracts with out-of-town vendors and bringing facility oversight in-house. Recapturing those contract dollars and markup margins directly offsets the initial setup costs of our local integrated network, keeping taxpayer money in the local economy while generating permanent operational savings.