Hello again! It’s me, Rohail, the Co-Op student working for your trusted city councillor. My last post was about my initial thoughts when I first started working here, but now that it has been about four months, I have learned a lot more that I’d like to share.

Sometimes, it’s easy to think that Mississauga is just another regular city. But, did you know, when it comes to our transit system, we have held some interesting first-time records?

In 1982, Mississauga was one of the first cities in all of Canada to use articulated double buses, the extra long ones with a bendy bit in the middle. In 1987, we were the very first to introduce electronic fare boxes. Then again, we were among the first to use air conditioning in public buses in 1989. What’s even more impressive is that only a few years before then, in 1976, Mississauga was operating outdated 20-year-old buses.

So I guess we aren’t just another city after all; we have one of the best transit systems and have had one for a while now.

Another thing that I had never really considered when running a city was the logistical problems of public services. For example, for a few weeks in spring, grass grows twice as fast, meaning it needs to be cut twice as much. What can we do about it? Well, we can’t get our 200 or so workers to work twice as hard because they are already working full-time. Then do we hire another 200 more workers for only a few weeks? Well, it wouldn’t make sense to hire people exclusively for a short period of time. It’d be expensive and irresponsible.

So the only solution, unfortunately, is to do nothing. Keep up the regular schedule and bring the grass back down to standard length once growth slows down.

There are plenty of logistical problems we have to deal with here, and up until recently, I had not realised

One of my main jobs here is making social media posts, from updates from the councillor to public service announcements or notifying people about upcoming events. Much like any other social media post, I get a wide range of comments, some of which are more negative than others. It is a little disheartening, but I will continue doing my best to mitigate this.

That will be all for my little blog for now. I’m still learning more about governance and politics, so no doubt I’ll be back with another post when  I have something new to share.