A number of councillors have made a point of requesting an employee organizational chart for the Town of Renfrew, but they’ve been somewhat stymied by a staff leadership that doesn’t feel inclined to release such a thing, ostensibly because it’s not something they “typically” do.
Which when you get right down to it, is staff-speak for we could if we wanted to, but we just don’t want to.
Which is staff-speak for you’re going to have to try a lot harder to get us to create, then release such information, and we’ll stonewall you until you and the other councillors make us do it through an explicit direction from Council.
I won’t go too much into how impressed I get when somebody tells me something can’t be done, or won’t be done, because, well, that’s not the way we typically do things. A statement like that doesn’t make me want to back off, it makes me want to insist that you go “atypical“ and give me the information that I’m entitled to.
But I’m not on Council, and the people with those jobs and responsibilities are grown-ups who can fight their own battles when they come up. In this case, there was a bit of pushback from Councillors Andrew Dick and John McDonald, but in the end, they meekly accepted a compromise to their original request, that being that the organizational chart will be created, but only made available to Council in closed session, because that’s where we go when we don’t want anyone knowing what it is that we’re talking about.
If this council were to serve another term together, I feel that they might successfully insist upon having their wishes carried out, but we’re not there yet, albeit a compromise is a bit of a move in the right direction.
To be absolutely fair-minded, the information requested has the potential to be awkward, as the truth can often be. It’ll not only show all the positions in the corporation with job descriptions, but it’ll also assign individual employee names to those positions. Again, it’s simply an exercise in “who does what” but staff is reluctant to share that information publicly for a number of reasons.
First, they think it’s a confidentiality issue, but that’s silly, because many corporations make this kind of information available, complete with contact information for every role identified on the chart. I know mine always was.
Staff is concerned about “protecting” their employees, meaning they don’t want to publicly reveal employee roles because they don’t want some irate citizen approaching some snow plow operator at a house league hockey game and drilling them for plowing the crap out of their front lawn two weeks before. They don’t want their employees accosted in the produce section of the local Metro, because again, that’s awkward. Everyone knows that stuff like that should be done in Dairy.
They don’t want anyone to get an inkling of how much money people make for their employment efforts, although their own salaries are on the Sunshine List and are far more likely to generate comment than the equipment operator making less than $100,000 / year. Yet the councillors, elected representatives of the taxpayers, who pay for all of this, shouldn’t be allowed to know this stuff. So the compromise is to tell the councillors in a closed meeting, but keep the taxpayers in the dark.
So much for all their talk of openness, of transparency. These folks are anything but those things.
Big on talk. Little on action. It’s kind of a joke.
Because you don’t typically do something a certain way, doesn’t mean you can’t do it that way. If your best argument is the old and weary “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” then you’ve lost the argument right there. And it begs the simple question: What if the way you’ve always done it is wrong?
I do understand the reticence about including salaries, and I can see this as being a bit of a reasonable compromise if the report to Council only allowed this information behind closed doors. That said, what about the rest of us, and in particular, what about the rest of us who actually pay the freight? Do those people not have a right, an entitlement, to know where their hard-earned, and often disappearing money, goes to?
Council is grappling with a budget that will be an exercise in absolute brutality. Making an effort to look at all financial considerations part of the corporation is entirely legitimate, and that includes staffing, the level of staffing, and the compensation of staff and other employees.
We’re all mature people here, right? If Joe Smith makes $65,000/year to sharpen pencils, we have a right to know about that. Because we may want to look at reducing the number of pencil sharpeners on staff, or we may want to get somebody else to negotiate for the town when the next collective agreement comes due with our employees. We may do what we must, and that is to leave no financial rock unturned, no outlay of cash sacrosanct, no compensation to be part of a Black Ops operation keeping it quiet.
It’s been claimed by some that Renfrew staff went on a bit of a “hiring spree” for a period, but I’m not well-versed enough to comment on that other than the fact that there are an awful lot of deputies and assistants in there. And there’s also that nagging thing about senior administrators receiving some sort of additional compensation for every employee serving under them. So anything that sheds light on any of that would be helpful, I feel.
We’re living in an extraordinary time, in that the municipality has accumulated much debt, significant debt, almost existential debt. Council, and by extension the taxpaying public, might have a legitimate argument about wanting to see the books in order to justify staffing costs and reconcile them with this debt.
Anybody who wanted to know how much money I made could find that out because I was, to a large degree, a public servant, meaning it was tax dollars that paid for my efforts. I also owned my own business, but that’s my business what I pulled in through that venture, and I don’t have to tell anyone squat about how much I made at my last yard sale. But the public domain was fair game.
In my world, I’d be happy if no worker from any corporation or effort, whether private or public, is harassed by some jackass at the next table. But how do you protect the world and everyone in it from the jackasses out there? Because if they’re going to get you, they’re going to get you, whether that’s at the curling rink or the tanning salon. Or if you have hair, the hairdresser or barber. That said, I can see the argument for not attaching the names of the individuals associated with each employee position, with the job title and description likely being enough to satisfy the scope of endeavour. So, to me, the names of the individuals aren’t needed, because it’s not an investigation into nepotism. We just want to know how much is being put out for salaries, to determine how much of that is essential or justifiable, and in a worst-case scenario, identify areas that might possibly survive cuts, albeit painful ones.
Councillors Dick and McDonald were applying pressure and they had CAO Gloria Raybone on the back foot, awkwardly attempting to answer their questions without giving away the “typical” cone of secrecy, which in staff-speak they refer to as confidentiality. The two are the same in many respects, except one wears a different sweater than the other. Instead of driving home their advantage, they both peeled back, with Dick going from “I’m not okay with this” to “How many sugars do you take in your coffee?” In other words, he decided right there, with the win clearly right in front of him, to take a powder and gush over the compromise, which to some might be taken as a deflection.
At any rate, it’s not my money, and we don’t seem to get this kind of thing in Horton, although in all honesty, I don’t pay too much attention to Horton Township so long as my garbage gets collected and the guy at the dump continues to say hello.
If only life were that simple in Renfrew.
Somebody should pass a by-law.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 