LETTERS TO THE EDITOR...One regional centre not best for region

(This letter was originally sent to Halton Regional chairman Joyce Savoline. A copy was made available to The Independent and Free Press.) Dear Ms. Joyce Savoline, I applaud you, your council and the staff of Halton Region to consider ways to make our tax dollars go the extra mile. However, when reading your column in March 15 Independent and Free Press, the following concerns me and I hope you will take it in consideration. I consider myself a resident of the region with average needs and have never had the need to use on the same day any two or more of the services you want to combine in the same location. Nor will I expect to ever have such a need. Therefore, I see no benefit for the residents of this region to combine the services into a physically same location. However, as with any centralization, I do see a potential problem with the traffic being generated to the regional grounds. All services you mentioned use regular office hours and thus there is a concentration of traffic for both the public and employees to the same location. For a government organization it would be prudent to show leadership in considering this social aspect of doing business, both from the point of an employer as well as of a service provider. Decentralizing services and spreading them evenly throughout the region is not only beneficial for the public, but also for employment opportunities. With the current state of technology, there is no boundary to the level of co-operation possible between departments in different locations. Some companies are going as far as providing virtual offices and showing the possibility of dislocating the service from their actual physical location. As being a provider of service to the public, it is imperative to make the accessibility of the service paramount and I fail to see how congesting disparate services would aid to that effect. If you would like to make better use of your facilities, I would keep in mind the usage patterns; like usage outside of office hours. Thank you for serving this region and I hope you will add this concern in your decision-making process of the project at hand. Chris Klomp, Georgetown