In a way, it seemed that Wednesday morning’s Town Council meeting, at least the open part of it, was the relative political equivalent of a McDonald’s drive-thru window, in that you got what you were looking for much quicker than had you gone for the regular in-store experience. At least for me, anyways, since Council then went into closed session, please don’t get me started.
But in that brief period of sunshine, important work was done, and that’s not being sarcastic.
On the agenda was the awarding of an IT — Informational Technology — contract, an item of no small importance when it comes to the efficient running of a corporation the size of the Town of Renfrew. To this point, IT services seemed to have been delivered and administered in a rather ad-hoc manner, with a certain individual’s name mentioned as the driver of the “system” employed thus far. It sort of sounded like the current IT program delivery had been far out-paced by the needs of the community, and that perhaps it had always been this way.
But that was then, and on Wednesday, we were talking about now, and off into the future, or at least three years of it.
Town administrative staff were recommending the awarding of a new IT contract to service provider OnServe for a period of three years. That recommendation was based upon an evaluation “scoring” process that was not elaborated upon, so no mention of the metrics or criteria that went into the scoring that went into the final recommendation. Which, of course, is unfortunate, since staff is asking Council to pass this recommendation without any advance notification that such a thing was even upcoming or contemplated, let alone $62,900.00 over budget.
Given the seemingly endless number of budget items that slip into the red on a regular basis, some inherited ones going a really bright red, it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise to staff that members of council might have some reservations about this.
And they did.
It started with Councillor Cybulski, who respectfully balked at rubber-stamping something he had no real information about. This was followed by Councillor Legris, then Councillors McWhirter and McDonald, followed by Reeve Emon and Mayor Sidney, making it unanimous among the politicians present that there were aspects of this recommendation that needed greater scrutiny applied on their part before voting.
This is important on a couple of levels.
First, this current iteration of Town Council are the decision-makers, and they hold the water for any decisions they make that come before them. Second, and unfairly, this is the same group that will have to pass a budget that will contain tax, service, and user-fee increases along with service and infrastructure maintenance reductions in order to address a massive budget shortfall they inherited from the previous council. Like it or not, that reality, and the public negativity that will likely be part of the fall-out, will fall squarely upon them. Again , not fair, but there it is.
Third, part of the third-party report dealing with Ma-Te-Way touched heavily upon former town staff allegedly going “rogue” when it came to decision-making, decision-making that the report indicates lacked the proper oversight from that council. Nobody’s suggesting the current town staff has gone rogue here, it’s more a statement of how due-diligence requires the level of oversight that Wednesday’s council-members were demonstrating.
So when an IT item for an expenditure that comes in at north of $60,000.00 over budget, that’s gotta be the first red flag. The second flag is that the recommendation is not supported by the evaluation scheme used to score the competing entrants. No information about the specifics of the offers of service, nor even the bottom-line bids of any of the applicants.
In other words, Council had no idea what was offered, and no idea about what they were getting had they passed this item Wednesday. It was a lose-lose for them in their positions of decision-makers and gate-keepers of administrative accountability. They had no choice but to balk.
I’m not saying this was the case with this particular recommendation, but this, to me, had the appearance of the kind of thing that may have gotten former councils in trouble through an over-extension of confidence in the administrative staff, a confidence that may have had them approving staff recommendations too quickly or without legitimate oversight. Decisions that, in hindsight, have and will have significant and painful ramifications.
It may well be that the previous budget for IT was woefully inadequate for the types of service this town requires, and that the new figure, while dramatically more, may well represent fair-market value for what a corporation the size of Renfrew needs. Actually, I suspect that to be the case. As I said earlier, the previous IT regime seemed to be an ad-hoc by-the-seat-of-our pants operation, and that friends, is no way to run a bakery.
Any time something runs over budget the warning buzzer needs to sound and the red lights need to flash, especially for these fellows tasked with making the decisions and exercising the leadership that they were entrusted with. Ultimately, it is their show, not administration’s. And they’re the ones who face the axe when things go south.
Staff were not, nor will they be happy. Nobody likes to have their recommendations scuttled, especially openly. The work they put in is questioned, not through the suggestion of incompetence or any other frailty, but simply because it was not accompanied by supporting data. And this is not the kind of supporting data you tuck somewhere in a 300-page meeting agenda that comes out a couple of days before a regular meeting, seemingly a regular occurrence.
I have plenty of operational reporting schemes that could be employed to make this process more mature and more efficient, and they don’t require any additional effort on those tasked with reporting. But these people don’t talk to me, and have flat-out ignored any attempt I’ve made to seek out their counsel.
So I simply stopped trying and started writing instead.
What I witnessed Wednesday was an exercise in good government by every decision-maker in the room. I’ve been critical before, but there will be none of that today. These people did exactly what they were required to do when given the heavy responsibility of leadership.
They led rather than followed.
The motion was put forward to look at this issue more closely, in a closed meeting no less. So, as pleased as I was by what I witnessed, it’s still with a tinge of mixed emotions. Because here we are with yet another closed meeting. And once in that venue, we’ll hear no more about this, since that’s where transparency goes to die.
It’s sort of like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand new Cadillac.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 