Woodstock Santa Claus Parade gets a visit from The City of Waterfalls

Sunday November 22, 2009 • Comments Off 

Venturing into yet again unchartered and untested waters, the City of Waterfalls crew ventured down hwy 403 for our first ever night time santa claus parade, as we continue our entries in parades around the province.

Honestly you never know what to expect with any of the parades, festivals or other events that I enter our team into, but this is what makes it so exciting, we are trying and doing things that have never been done in Hamilton’s history.

Last night waterfall car #1 and the waterfall bus attended our first time night time santa claus parade, and we could not believe the amount of people that came out to see the parade!

Some say that there where 3 times the amount of people that we had here in Hamilton last week!!

Either way, we where greeted with a lot of cheers and waves, and the people from Woodstock and parade organizers could not have been nicer to us!

It was also a first for us in dressing up the waterfall vehicles with lights as well which presented a few challenges for us in how we where going to handle the electrical needs of both vehicles.

The waterfall bus has a big advantage in that we have plugs in the basement as well as the engine bay, and we utilized the engine bays electricity to power the lights.

As we get ready for future night time events, you can bet that we will ” kick it up a notch” and see what else we can do to get more lights on the bus!!

Parade organizers and citizens thanked us for coming all the way from Hamilton for the parade, they where very appreciative that we would go through all the trouble to organize it all and make the trek to their city.

And you see this is also a secondary but possibly much bigger bonus for the City of Hamilton, the establishment of friendships and associations with organizations and business’s that at some point in the future benefit us in a much bigger way.

Later that night and today the web traffic that is coming in from Woodstock is very noticeably up, and rightly so.

Many many thanks to all the volunteers that helped organize and took part in this parade, its a lot of work, and yes it seems that you are on the road every weekend, ( we are) but the City of Hamilton and all its citizens live in a better City due to your efforts and committment.



Hamilton’s New Police Chief

Saturday November 21, 2009 • Comments Off 

Well the decision was finally announced, and the last 24 hours has been a bee hive of activity around town, so much so that cell phone number 3 was in back up as everyone under the sun was calling to talk about the new chief!

My background with Chief Brian Mullan is known to all, when I very publicly resigned from his police services advisory board earlier this year.

The media carried the story, but in a nut shell I could not take any more lies and deceit that I was put through over the years.

Lots of people have asked if he has ever apologized to me and unfortunately he hasn’t, and quite frankly I dont ever expect him to, we met in a very public place recently and the guilt and embarrasement that I felt from him was very noticeable.

He leaves behind a broken machine that needs to be fixed, and the only way to do it is for everyone to band together, identify the problems and work towards a solution.

The one thing that everyone needs to understand is this, the Hamilton Police Service is not the personal playground of a selected few individuals, that can do anything they want anytime they want.

A new level of accountability to the citizens of Hamilton is absolutely imperative, and if there is any public institution in this City that people need to have 100% belief and trust in is our Police Service.

At this time unfortunately we do not have this.

The rebuilding process starts immediately.

Here is an article that the media ran about my resignation

http://www.hamiltonmountainnews.com/news/article/153492



Visitor 100,000 drops by the city of waterfalls website for a visit

Tuesday November 17, 2009 • Comments Off 

At 2:17 pm today a visitor from Toronto stopped by our City of Waterfalls website and made history by being the 100,000th person to visit our site.

The website went live May 19, 2008 and since then has grown at an incredible rate.

Each and every day people are coming from all over the world to our site, but ironically enough its the local visitors that are growing the fastest.

A year ago we had 50% traffic from Hamilton and the rest from outside, but that has now changed to a whopping 75% of traffic is now from outside Hamilton.

Each and every day we are on the streets spreading the word about Hamilton and its beautiful waterfalls, just last weekend we attended the Hamilton Santa Claus Parade and handed out 5,000 brochures and postcards to people along the route.

I need to thank the people whom have come out to make this the largest social movement the City has ever seen or experienced in its history, it is truly amazing and humbling to watch Hamiltonians go to all lengths to promote the City when we are at events, festivals and fairs, there is still a lot of work to do, and I look forward to reporting back to you when we reach the next milestone!!!



Canadian Heroes Launch on Nov 11 2009

Saturday November 7, 2009 • Comments Off 

Canadian Heroes – A tribute to our soldiers

canadian heroes

Eight Juno Award winning Canadian musicians have put together a song for our Armed Forces that rocks, with all funds going to a charity to be formed that will help Canadian soldiers.



    BLOGS

    Read Chris Ecklund's Blog, Chris' Corner, right here! Chris makes frequent posts about issues of importance to Hamiltonians.

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