It certainly looks like Charlene Jackson is gone as Renfrew’s treasurer.
Earlier today, I was given a heads-up about a job posting on the employment site Indeed, where sure enough, there’s a posting for a position that sure sounds like the one she’s held down until just recently.
That posting appears below.
Budget deliberations were brutal, and there’s no time in a treasurer’s annual calendar where almost every road, every request, and every question lands squarely at your door as it does at budget time.
Also, Renfrew is in the middle of some bad times, especially money-wise, and that’s something that’s not going to change any time in the near future.
So I guess I’m saying that being the treasurer of an entity that teeters on the edge of financial ruin can’t be the easiest job in the world.
Apparently, Ms. Jackson was prepared to retire but was persuaded to take the Renfrew treasurer job a couple of years back, perhaps because of compensation and a promise of a certain freedom of action and decision-making. But then the wheels came off the scooter with the whole Ma-Te-Way thing, for one, and maybe now no amount of money or power can assuage her to remain, although I did hear some stuff about the mayor and the reeve attempting to do just that, to get her to stay.
There will be palpable anger in the land when property tax notices go out, so maybe Ms. Jackson has decided to get the hell out of the way of any impending shit storm coming up Raglan Street and heading for the gates of Fort Renfrew. Which would make her a woman of no mean intelligence.
In any organization, there’s bound to be a certain level of animosity between employees, especially if jurisdictions overlap or if there is a clash of personalities, or personalities seeking to attain and then maintain personal power. As I’ve said in other articles, something happens to a human being when they get a promotion, as in it’ll often go straight to their head. I’m not in any position to make that assertion in the case of Ms. Jackson, but I’ve had two prominent sources, independent of one another, give me what amounts to a bit of a peek behind the drapes.
First, apparently Treasurer Jackson wasn’t thrilled with Mayor Sidney’s use of his newly-gifted Strong Arm Powers, er Strong Mayor Powers, by elevating Town Clerk Carolynn Errett to a director’s position and a big fat raise to go along with it. Perhaps this promotion had Errett slurping from Jackson’s sippy-cup of powers, and that would be intolerable, especially when the Clerk was getting a little uppity as it was, since Errett is the de-facto leader of Renfrew, the result of a soft-coup of smiles and back-room machinations that clearly bedazzled our Strong Mayor.
Errett, you see, is the female and municipal equivalent of Napoleon Bonaparte, who started small, became a corporal, then an artillery captain, then a general before taking over the whole show himself and proclaiming himself emperor and literally crowning himself while other prominent French leaders sat there and wondered “Where the hell did this guy come from?”
“D’où diable sort ce type?” to be precise
So maybe there’s some of that at play. Errett now firmly runs the show, mostly owing to the fact that the Strong mayor, who is actually a Weak Mayor, sat there and allowed it to happen. No surprise if true, because both of them pre-date this current council, so maybe some personal synergy was discovered long ago that is now coming to the top.
I’d say that Errett’s now the power behind the throne, our very own female version of France’s Cardinal Mazarin, if I may cling to my French references.
A different source claimed that Ms. Jackson is no fan of newly-minted CAO — Chief Administrative Officer — Gloria Raybone. I wouldn’t know if this were something strictly personal, like a clash of personalities, or simply a clash of power, or both. Not long ago, Renfrew had no CAO, preferring to allow department directors to behave as minor emperors in their own right, people unafraid of any mayor or councillor or anything else for that matter because they had been emboldened by the years of incompetence swirling around the place. There was nobody around who would say peep to a director much less hold them to account, and so perhaps Jackson missed those good old days, and resented Raybone coming in as her de-facto boss when she had no boss before.
Like I’ve mentioned before in other articles, several sources have suggested to me that Jackson was promised all sorts of things from her buddy and former co-worker, former CAO Rob Tremblay, when she took the job in the first place. Now with Raybone here, perhaps the new CAO is asserting her sovereignty over items that had been promised to Jackson, and that this may have caused some resentment, especially if the new state of affairs flies in the face of any conditions that may have been part of any Tremblay-Jackson pact.
Or maybe she’s just fed up and tired of being part of a dysfunctional corporation.
One way or another, it appears the reign of Charlene Jackson as Renfrew treasurer has come to an end.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 