If you’re in Renfrew, and you’d like to see the concepts of openness and transparency in action, you might best be advised to look somewhere other than your local municipal politicians and senior administrators
Taciturn comes across as too complementary. This group, or its leadership anyway, are among the most secretive and close-to-the-vest-types I’ve had the opportunity to observe. And this, by no means, is like bird-watching. It’s an excruciating act of prolonged witnessing of the need to pull teeth over the most minute of topics, where nothing of potential risk can be discussed in the light of day, and where Council and select staffers retreat behind closed doors to do, and to discuss whatever it is that they do and discuss in there when the cameras go dark and the annoying public is shut out.
One thing that is seemingly fact beyond argument is the notion that you could write your local political representatives, or municipal administrators, and have your questions and commentary considered. But instead, the process seems to be to completely ignore correspondence such as this. Of, course, you could always write a follow-up letter, and carbon copy other councillors and administrators to broaden the scope of accountability, but then you just find yourself ignored by an expanded circle of people, not something a lot of us would find conducive to building up personal self-esteem.
Sometimes pressure is applied, and they buckle for a moment (the bend, not break school of administrative philosophy) and lose themselves briefly by raising up a particular letter, or two, or several from a concerned individual and put that person on the agenda for a Tuesday night Council meeting. Sometimes this mean the letter, or letters, get included in the agenda package for the meeting, folding in quite nicely and quietly among the 400+ pages of mind-numbing minutia that regularly gets belched-out a couple of days before each gathering. Once on the agenda, it can be claimed that the correspondence has been “brought forward” to the public, even though it’s been tucked away in a dark closet section of the overall package.
If you’ve really been applying pressure, a veritable full-court press kind of pressure, you may even get invited to make a delegation to Council, where for eight minutes you can grab your fifteen seconds of fame, or as close as you’re going to get to it with these people. They’ll listen respectfully, nod their heads, smile at your idiosyncrasies, and find your nervousness to be something that’s rather cute. When your eight minutes or less are up, they’ll ask questions of clarification, accompanied by more head-nodding and smiles. They’ll make you feel like a million bucks, that you’ve finally gotten through, that all that effort and worry has amounted to something. That it’s all been worth it. I could see you going to Boston Pizza for beers if you could afford it.
And then you’ll leave, sort of like the way you leave a public washroom stall, when the door has been calibrated to smack you in the ass on your way out, as if to get you out of there faster. You know, in case you were thinking of lingering, or basking in your moment of glory.
And then that’s it. Your spotlight fades, and swings to another topic. Your eight minutes satisfies the stated need for “openness and transparency.”
In short, you can go away now.
Two such pieces of correspondence were received by Council as information at Tuesday night’s meeting. As usual, they were buried in a 400+ page document, and further buried in a section of correspondence that included mail coming in from just about every provincial acronym imaginable. Council drove right past the entire section, just like that poor restaurant that fell on hard times when the highway bypass was built. Not even a drive-thru window’s worth of attention. Just zipped right past the whole section, the two citizen letters part of the blur.
God bless Andrea McCormick.
She’s clearly indefatigable in her thirst for information, which his entirely laudable, as there is much information to be had, although never given.
Ms. McCormick has been back-and-forthing with the mayor, the clerk, and the CAO office for as long as I’ve taken an interest in Council, so maybe five months in my experience, but perhaps going back even farther than that.
She asks questions. She gets rebuffed. This leads to more questions about being rebuffed, also rebuffed. It’s culminated in a delegation before Council, where heads bobbed and smiles flashed, and Kumbaya was piped in through the speakers, although in hushed tones. And then, her eight minutes up, she got the toilet stall door treatment.
Well she’s back. And she’s got some questions. And they made it on to the 400+ page agenda. And they, like the entire section of correspondence, went by in a flash, although not even a flash, more a case of just being completely ignored as if they weren’t there in the first place. Her questions are mostly 2025 budget-related, so there would be some sensitivity around these topics, and the usual reluctance to reveal anything that might come back and bite. Ms. McCormick would also like to know what the plan is for the abandoned water treatment plant that lies in the shadow of the demolition axe.
Her tone is respectful, even good-natured, maybe the glow of the delegation still washing over her. But she doesn’t strike me as anybody’s fool, and I think she gets the sense that she’s being ignored when she’s being ignored, so I’m expecting more correspondence from her to the town in the coming days and weeks.
They thought they took care of her before, the old velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist approach. But apparently it didn’t take, and here Andrea is again.
With those bloody questions!
Then there’s Bob (aka Bobby) Dillabough.
You don’t even have to know the guy to feel you know the guy. I could pass him in the light of day on a Raglan Street sidewalk and walk right past him without knowing that I had just, albeit momentarily, passed a whisper away from some Renfrew royalty. For the record, he could say exactly the same thing about me, but I’m not royalty, so there’s that. But his is a name encountered frequently, so I guess I’m saying he’s kind of a known entity.
Anyways, Bobby (aka Bob) has some concerns about the Town’s latest public opinion survey, their online outreach to gather opinion from the dozen or so people who might be aware of it.
Mr. Dillabough correctly observes that it’s a bit disingenuous to blame Renfrew’s budget difficulty and proposed budgetary problems solely at the foot of inflation. He further suggests that it might be a better idea to be upfront with the local citizenry about the real reasons for the dramatic belt-tightening that is already being experienced, and to be experienced even more fully in the future.
He also suggests that advertising a survey on a municipal electronic message board may not have the depth and breadth of reach needed to make it possible for most taxpayers to know about the poll, much less participate in it. He kindly offers the assistance of the local radio station to help in that regard, but out of respect to Renfrew royalty, I’ll resist the opening to tell that local radio station to go pound some salt, although I think I just did.
myFM Centre myASS.
Anyways, Mr. Dillabough (aka Bobby) makes another point about the cookie-cutter questions being applied to all the municipal departments and the offices of the senior administration. He says that he’s impacted by Town of Renfrew policies and services in an ad-hoc manner, and even then, as a matter of degree. He feels that the Town’s provision of a 250-character limited response window on the survey is not enough room to explain the nuance of his situation, something he feels is the same for many others. To Bob (aka Mr. Dillabough), his situation is a little more complex than a 250-word Twitter response can accurately capture.
All well and good. Kudos to both Ms. McCormick and Mr. Dillabough for making these outreaches to the Town, and thank you for the role you’re playing in keeping people honest, so to speak. Figuratively speaking, though, both letters are Cobden on a trip from Ottawa to North Bay. You go through the place, barely slowing from highway speed, possibly take note that it’s there, then blast right on out the other side. Except they didn’t even take note.
No intended offence to Cobdeners. Or are they Cobdenites?
Andrea McCormick has demonstrated an ability and a willingness to mix it up with Council and local administration. Now Bob Dillabough has been perfunctorily ignored as well.
We’ll have to see if this generates a further response from either, or even both.
COVER PHOTO: Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst
NEWSMAGRENFREW 