Transcript: This quote I’ve seen in the Langley Times twice now is the perfect example of how you can spin facts to push a narrative. Mayor’s Office at the State of the Union and in a recent newspaper article is talking about how the long-term debt in the township has risen from $175 million to $421 million. Really doesn’t sound like that much money for everything that they’ve built. But long-term debt is just one pool of debt. Let’s take a look at the overall picture of the financial situation of the township. So you’ll see behind me is this slide from the capital budget. There is $420 million, and that’s the long-term debt they’re talking about. But there’s also $184 million down here that just didn’t get mentioned. That $184 million is temporary borrowing. What a municipality does when they’re building a new project, for instance, the new covered soccer field, is they’ll take that money out and they’ll hold it in temporary status until the project’s complete, and then it gets turned into long-term borrowing. While it’s in temporary status, you don’t pay any principal, just interest. It’s like renovating your home and putting it on credit card and saying no that accrued no new debt because it’s on credit card, I didn’t take out a home line against The next piece of debt that got forgotten about is what’s inside the housing trust. So this got borrowed to build largely market rate housing, about 70% of it’s going to be market rate. That’s another $177 million of borrowing. And then they also borrowed $79 million internally. They took from the Neighborhood Parks Reserve, the Sewer Capital Reserve, as well as the Public Works Equipment Reserve. This money, by law, needs to be paid back with interest over the next 30 years. It’s internal borrowing, but it’s still borrowing. We need to come up with the money to pay back. And this is ultimately my biggest problem about the upcoming election. If we are so proud of how we’ve built things in the township, let’s be real and honest about the underlying numbers and how we built these things. The number is not $420 million, it’s $861 million. Let’s set that in stone right now and move forward with our base understanding that this is the debate about how we want to move forward in the township. As always, follow for more Langley updates.