Kojo Damptey: Ward 14 City Council candidate

What are two of your citywide priorities for Hamilton, why, and how will you achieve them?

The first one is responding to residents' concerns about how property taxes have increased in the last term.

And so as a candidate running in 2026 cycle, that is foremost apparent.

If candidates don't talk about that, then we are not listening to what residents are saying.

So I believe that that is the first thing.

How do we address that? I would say that we need stricter financial controls.

We also need to come up with a catalog of how the city spends money.

I'll be a little bit longer on this one.

I remember when we did the work to restructure the Board of Health, the council decided to spend $50,000 on hiring a consultant, and the consultant came back to say the exact same thing that people were saying.

That's $50,000 that could have been better spent somewhere else.

So for me, what are some of the criteria that the council itself can say, "If we're gonna hire consultants, these are some things that we should have before we even make that decision." So that's like honing down on mismanagement of pots of money that the city is responsible for.

The second is, and I hear this on the West Mountain, there are seniors that have lived here for 47 years, 40 years, 30 years, and they are asking, "I keep on paying property taxes.

My pensions are capped.

I don't have the money." So one of the ideas that I'm thinking of is, if you're 70 years old, you've been paying property taxes for 30 years, why don't we cap your property taxes for a term? That way, we are easing the financial burden on seniors.

So that's number one.

Number two, we have to address the homelessness crisis that we see in our city.

This is something that has been prevalent in our city even before 2020.

When I was part of the Hamilton Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan, we talked about homelessness in twenty nineteen, and the city did not take us seriously.

So I think w-when we want to address homelessness, transitional housing, how do we do that? We also have to ensure that we are providing different forms of housing for people.

Rent geared to income, cooperative housing.

Up on the West Mountain, we have two federal cooperative housing.

So we need to ensure that we have all different types of housing to support the myriad number of folks that are houseless in our city.

What are two of your priorities for Ward fourteen, and how will you achieve them?

Two things, resident engagement and communication.

One of the things I've been sharing with Ward fourteen residents since May first is the establishment of neighborhood councils in each of our nine neighborhoods here on the mountain.