The Town of Renfrew wants your input.
Actually, they want your complicity.
The town is pumping a survey of theirs where they hope to get some direction on where to go as they approach the time when they have to do The Big Reveal, also known as the 2025 Municipal Budget.
It’s not a document they’re overly excited about, mostly because it’s going to be brutal on you, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer of Renfrew, Ontario, the people who foot the bill and the people who will be most angry when their tax bill shows up in the mail.
The very people who will be most angry at…them.
They’re going to present this as an example of their commitment to openness and transparency, to demonstrate to you how sensitive they are to your feedback, how they’ve discovered the advantages and benefits of being up-front with the people they provide services for and to.
Sure it is.
It’s also a clever little ploy to ensnare you in the accountability, even culpability, surrounding the decisions that have been made in the past, both distant and recent, that will result in you seeing big increases to your tax burden, big reductions in your service provision, or more than likely both.
That means that when the stuff hits the fan, when those taxes and fees go up, and those services go down, they can then say they consulted you, and you gave them permission to do the hiking and slashing that you’re going to be really mad at.
They’re going to make it all your fault.
There are seven municipal departments, seven little empires if you will, all of them seemingly independent of the other, none of them really giving the impression that they work as part of a unified, cohesive, whole. At least that hasn’t been in their history. I’m impressed with some. Less so with others.
The survey questions are identical for all seven areas of municipal administration. Their titles are best represented in the form of a graphic.
It’s absolutely beyond the pale that the creators of this survey are willing to suggest that inflation is the sole reason for tax and fee hikes and reductions in service delivery. That’s a really convenient excuse, since everyone talks about inflation these days, so it’s a good thing to blame everything on.
The fact of the matter is that nothing has contributed more to the financial situation this town is in more than mismanagement, both past and current. Not across the board mismanagement, but a definite series of extremely unfortunate and un-forced errors due to either inexperience, incompetence or downright possible skullduggery, favouritism, cronyism, turf wars, and maybe even worse.
Inflation is nothing more than a side-car cause of our problems. All municipalities are impacted by inflation. It’s just us here in Renfrew who have Ma-Te-Way expansion, the Town Hall renovation fiasco, and important town records in cardboard boxes in a dilapidated building. Then there’s transportation and other infrastructure with no records kept at all, causing significant budget overages on almost every infrastructure-related project. Turf fights among senior staff that caused and do cause untold damage to the town, to reputations, and to an acceptable, safe, and positive work environment. The clash of personalities who raised themselves up as gods, or at least minor emperors in their own domains.
These are the reasons you’ll pay more and be serviced less.
Don’t let these people fool you, or even attempt to fool you. Ask them how they got their current jobs, what side-deals may have been made to entice them, and what their compensation packages are. Ask where the people they’re replacing went. Ask why they went.
And how much money was spent to make them go.
Ask what’s different now, today?
Ask where the buck stops. Who’s in charge? Who’s got the whatever-it-takes to tell us the truth, all the truths? Ask about the status of reports, recommendations, and investigations. Ask questions related to transparency.
And whatever you do, don’t let them bullshit you. Not for free, anyways.
There are good and qualified people who have since taken over some of the municipal departments.
The senior folks, though, would want to be able to cover their collective and individual butts, or execute the proverbial CYA maneuver, where they can claim that they raised your taxes and cut your services because you told them they could. They want to throw the whole mess onto your backs, and slide out of the accountability spotlight themselves.
They’ll do the math on the relatively small sample response they get, and hammer those responses into percentages, giving you the idea that large numbers of people support this, or support that increase and cut. Less than half of eligible voters came out to vote the last municipal election. How many will respond to a survey they know nothing about unless they’re avid followers of the town’s website? Or they happen to drive by one of the municipal message boards in town. The biggest impact inflation will have on anything will more than likely be in the manipulation of the numbers from the survey.
For example, of the sixty-seven people who theoretically respond, fifty-one indicated we should shutter the dog park. That turns into “76% of Renfrew Residents Demand Close of Dog Park.”
And ta-da, it’s your fault.
But economic inflation impacting your taxes and service delivery? Only to a degree, the same degree as every other municipality in the province. But will those other municipalities experience the same level of tax and fee hikes and service reductions you will?
They’re going to raise your taxes and cut your services. Then wrap you up in the decision. Cover you in the cloak of shared responsibility for extremely unpopular decisions.
To be as fair as possible, many of the tough decisions to be made are attempts to address egregious mis-management that happened before, no question. And like it or not, those currently making the decisions will be judged by the town-folk of Renfrew almost as if all our problems were their fault, and that’s not the case at all.
That said, strong winds of change have blown many contributing individuals away. But those winds weren’t strong enough to blow everything that ails us away. There are still traces of that pre-existing administrative mentality present, to the detriment of the town in my opinion.
In the interim, a survey seems like a legitimate way to at least include us in some of this decision-making, although we need to be brilliantly aware of the fact that this Council, and this group of senior administrators — Gloria Raybone is brand-new as CAO and gets a temporary pass, although she’s probably one of the the drivers behind the survey — are not ones who feel bound by any recommendation made to them from any source. In fact, in my experience, they have a tendency to routinely ignore recommendations.
It’s a thing.
But this survey is as much about providing them with political cover as it is anything else, so just be aware of that when they come back with the “You said we could” line when you protest your next tax bill.
That’s when they’re going to tell you they’re delivering on the mandate you gave them, all eighty of you who responded to a survey nobody really knew about.
It’s another example of how, no matter the issue and no matter the need, politics, optics, and face-saving are never far away.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 