I don’t know if it’s because of the impending budget, or if it’s merely a matter of coincidence, but Renfrew Town Council meetings are becoming longer and longer, marathons really, with last night’s gathering consuming five and a half hours before going into closed session, which is pretty wild given the fact that I left at about 11:15 PM. That means the closed session extended beyond that, which has me feeling entirely sympathetic to the plight of a local municipal politician and municipal administrators.
That the agenda was chock-full was evident from the 400-plus pages of agenda materials released last Friday. Also last Friday, a Renfrew staffer gave me a bit of heads-up that Tuesday’s meeting was going to be on the brutal side in terms of length. I remember laughing somewhat at that piece of fore-knowledge, because I’ve sat through a lot of sessions of people hot air and gassing for hours at a time, so I felt I was up to the task.
But for the love of God, almost six hours? And again, that’s six hours before being chased out of the room so they could talk among themselves. You can throw a hood over a guy’s head and waterboard him all day and it would be like a light swim compared to this exercise in democracy, both time-wise and often content-wise. More meetings like this one may trigger a Geneva Convention investigation.
No fewer than three delegations before the meeting itself even got started, each one having a ten-minute limit that quickly adds up to half an hour when all is said and done, more if Council has any questions for the presenters.
In all honesty, not much could be done by anyone to make this situation any less onerous, but there’s one thing that I’ve observed on more than one occasion that contributes mightily to the time spent, and the confusion sewn, during Council meetings.
It’s the prevalence of bureaucratic-speak, a language specific to administrators just about everywhere. It’s loaded with acronyms and terms and circular thinking that make it difficult to determine what the hell is being said. This is obviously the language of the staff lunch room, but it’s not the language of the general population.
I’ve always found in my forty-plus years as a communicator that if my audience speaks English, it would be ideal if I spoke English as well. That is if my intent is to make myself understood. And make no mistake, as the communicator, the onus is on me to be understood, not the other way around. The audience is why I’m there in the first place. If I can’t get them to understand me, then I’m no good as a communicator, it’s that simple.
I’ve seen teachers that were absolutely brilliant in their mastery of their field, but couldn’t get any of that priceless knowledge out of them. So honestly, how does that make one an effective teacher? If your students don’t understand a damned thing you’re saying, then with all due respect, what the hell good are you? Even straight-forward and simple concepts can become as clear as mud when presented by the wrong person, or if the presenter can’t or won’t be bothered making the attempt or effort to be understood.
Communication is not an effort to make yourself sound smart or impressive, it’s an undertaking in being understood by your audience.
It sort of reminds me of Vatican II, where the Catholic Church dragged itself out of the Middle Ages and began holding the Mass in the vernacular of the people, in our case English. Having the priest face the congregants was a progressive move as well. Much better than the guy talking to a statue in Latin while the rest of us just sort of stood/sat/knelt there, I suppose revelling in the mysticism of the whole thing. There are still dogmatic Catholics that regret this change, which is nothing short of bollocks, since I can’t remember any instance where God or Jesus spoke in Latin. But inconsistencies like this can be ignored easily if you’re bound by some notion of Catholic purity rooted in a time before Johannes Gutenberg or Martin Luther.
Have you ever gone to a parent-teacher interview and come away perplexed? Like, you’re in the car on the way home and you turn to your spouse and ask “Did you understand anything he/she said in there?” That’s the same thing, somebody all caught up in the language of their profession, in this case edu-speak, and assuming that the rest of the world speaks in such a ridiculous manner.
Simple things made difficult to understand by someone who refuses to acknowledge the fact that their audience speaks English.
It’s so unnecessary. Plus people hate it.
This is a legitimate contributor to a lot of the problems faced by this Council as it receives information and reporting from the local civil servants, and it causes unnecessary confusion that makes mistakes not just possible, but detrimental. And it also has an impact on the clock.
The biggest offenders are Clerk Carolynn Errett and Chief Administrative Officer Gloria Raybone, with Director of Development and Environment/Town Planner/Deputy CAO Eric Withers — that’s a hell of a title — coming a close second. Sometimes Treasurer Charlene Jackson speaks too much treasurer-speak, which can throw councillors and observers out of the boat if employed too liberally. On the other side of things, Director of Community & Recreation Services and Library CEO Kelly Latendresse knows how to speak English, as does Director of Engineering & Asset Management Andrea Bishop. Manager of Environmental Services Amanda Springer is a proficient reader, and demonstrated that prowess by reading to us from the provided agenda document word for word, a real treat for those of us who had already read the document a couple of times already. But at least in her defence, there were probably a few folks assembled at the table who had not, so maybe story time was something that was unfortunately needed to make sure everyone had a baseline for the topic.
My apologies if I’m incorrect with any of those titles. Perhaps they might update the Town’s website just as a matter of routine, but that would be on the communications person who ostensibly communicates with someone out there, I just can’t find who. All I know is that I’d hate to be the guy who does the embroidery work on any staff golf shirts if job titles are part of the work order.
Time after time after time after time I’ve witnessed some of these folks give responses that, while I’m sure are well-meaning, fall well short of the obligation to make oneself understood to the audience at hand. I can’t possibly tell you how many times I’ve seen Council, virtually all of them, shaking their collective heads at some of the responses they get, unable to fully or even partially understand, whether it’s content or issue-related or, especially, a matter of simple procedure.
They’ll even ask follow-up questions seeking clarity of understanding, only to be as dumbfounded as they were before. And you can see it as it happens, a councillor unwilling to ask for a fourth time for a clarification for fear of looking stupid, not realizing that the rest of us are considering ourselves to be stupid as well.
A terrific example happened last night when Council was going over the number of summer students that ought to be hired by the Town this summer. The treasurer recommended hiring twenty-two such students, citing the cost effectiveness of having students assisting regular staff during the summer months. But Council balked, because the municipal budget hasn’t yet been sorted out, and it struck them as being irresponsible to move forward with such a plan in the face of a budget that has the potential, likely probability, of being a tough-sell budget given the litany of financial disasters this town has been saddled with. The treasurer legitimately commented that, by the time Council gets its books in order (a relative term) most of the students applying for summer work would have moved on to employment opportunities elsewhere.
Initially, a compromise of sorts was reached.
Five student positions were already funded, through grant or government program. It was decided that these five positions could proceed, given that they presented no cost to the Town. A motion was put forward to do just that.
But before the vote on that motion, the wheels came off the bus.
Councillor Kyle Cybulski sought an amendment to the original motion, one that would include a number of other summer student positions in Public Works and Parks and Recreation. It was this amendment to the original motion, a relatively simple matter, that ended up eating the clock better than any penalty kill for a five minute major.
The Clerk and CAO took several stabs at explaining the requisite procedure, resulting in more of that head-shaking I mentioned earlier. The Clerk gave her third lesson in parliamentary theory by going over the add/subtract doctrine, explaining that an amendment was confined to something that either added or subtracted from the original motion, so long as it left the spirit of the original motion intact. Totally legitimate, but not what they were looking for, but awesome to hear again as a sort of review lesson.
There ensued a back-and-forth, round-and-round, and over-and-under of explanations and words that flew through the night air but never landed with any tangible impact.
Then Ms. Errett decided to try another approach, speaking English to her audience, their mother-tongue and the official language of business in the chamber.
She indicated, in English, that Cybulski’s amendment was okay, in that it added to the original motion without changing the spirit of its intent. But, she said, Council had to vote on the amendment before they voted on the original motion. That’s because any change to the original motion needed to be approved and accepted by Council before moving forward with a vote on the motion itself. So two votes would be required. One to approve the change, or amendment, and the other to approve the original motion.
In about 25 seconds, using the language of her audience, the Clerk made the process understandable when for the previous 20 minutes, three senior administrators talked all around what it was that Council was looking for.
Sitting there watching this transpire and not being able to say anything was an extraordinarily excruciating experience that made me want to throw myself through a window, but there are no windows in the chamber, and I felt throwing myself against a wall would be counter-productive and just plain stupid, so I ruled it out.
Staff has to realize that they’re not at a Clerk’s conference, or a CAO conference, or a treasurer’s conference when they undertake to provide advice and assistance. They’re required to move past and off the language of their professional peers and speak the language that is prevalent outside their offices and outside their circle of co-bureacrats. As I said, the official language of the proceedings is English, and not some in-house twist on that language.
Again, communication is about being understood, not merely making impressive noises with your mouth and gesturing with your arms and hands. A failure to do this results inevitably in the Shakespearian “much ado about nothing” syndrome.
Teachers need to learn this. So do municipal administrators.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 