It’s late in the third period and your team is down by three goals. Or it’s the seventh inning, and the boys are down by four, your starter has been knocked out of the game, and your best player swinging the hottest bat was injured back in the third, yet remains in the game, albeit hobbled and a shadow of his regular self.
You’re at a Renfrew Town Council meeting, your eyes are stinging, and you’re questioning all the concepts of good governance you’ve ever learned and experienced. You’re two-and-a-half hours into the meeting, and you’re convinced that if you stay any longer, it may become a police matter, or a health matter, or both.
So you leave the rink. Shut off the television. Gather your belongings and leave.
This is where, sometimes, you wake up the next morning to discover your team came back and won in double overtime, or that hobbled slugger pulled off a Kirk Gibson and pounded out a walk-off homer for the win in extra innings. Or that something of substantive merit tool place towards the end of the council meeting.
All of this has likely happened, in some way or another, with all of us, and it happened to me fairly recently when I bailed on a meeting only to miss something tangible towards the end.
I’m not suggesting you go about it all backwards, where you sit down at your computer, fire up the interwebs, and start your Council/YouTube experience from the end and work back towards the middle. But you could.
The tail end of the meeting is usually where you will find councillors making what are called “notice of motions” where they put an item in front of everyone signalling their intent to get into the matter, whatever the matter might be, a little more deeply than what otherwise might have been the case. It also provides others present with a bit of a “heads-up” that something is going to be discussed in some greater detail at the next meeting. A notice can also request administrative staff to move some furniture around to see if they can bring any enlightenment, or proof of consideration/action towards the topic.
Councillor Andrew Dick unwrapped three such notices at the end of the last general meeting of Council, likely causing assembled staff to do their patented internal eye-rolls — they’re getting better at this with experience — and causing people like me to sit up and take notice, even though we find out about it after-the-fact.
The first notice of motion had to do with the BIA — Business Improvement Association — asking permission to set up electronic message boards at Ma-Te-Way and at Low Square. I won’t get into all of the ins and outs of this application, but I can say that the BIA has purchased these boards already, and are looking to plant them in high-visibility areas in the town. These boards are advertised as being 40 inches X 40 inches, which means they’re not the type that anyone’s going to be reading as they drive past in a vehicle. Rather, given their size, or lack of, they’re better suited for walk-by traffic, so long as nobody’s already standing in front of them. To be honest, a 40” X 40” board doesn’t offer up a lot of real estate, and the BIA has plans to shoe-horn quite a bit of information onto these platforms, which means they better be investigating some pretty small font sizes. I’m not a member of the BIA, nor would I ever be invited/compelled, so the size of their message boards is of little consequence to me. But Councillor Dick would like staff to look into the efficacy of the BIA’s request, and report back to Council in a couple of weeks, or whenever the next full council meeting takes place.
Of the three notices of motion, this was the one I cared least about, not that I don’t care, but just that I cared about the other two more.
Earlier in the week, I published two articles regarding citizens making delegations to Council about situations where they got hosed through no fault of their own, and were seeking some form of redress. In both cases there was an element of staff whack-a-mole, where the people making the presentation approached the town about their respective issues, but were given the default cold-shoulder by a staff accustomed to just flat-out ignoring citizen concerns or brushing them aside as irrelevant and likely beneath their attention.
Meaning that Susan Barr over on Haig has a basement full of damages caused by project negligence in a town road-resurfacing project, and is therefore out of pocket to the tune of thousands, and still no prospect that the same thing won’t happen again next year.
It also means that Jack Groenewoud over on Otteridge will never get satisfaction from being erroneously charged $600 extra on his water bill, mostly for running his water for six consecutive days non-stop, or so they say. He didn’t, but that doesn’t matter, because if the town says you did, then you did, and that’s all there is to it.
Councillor Dicks’s final two notice of motions seek to revisit these two issues.
The Councillor asked staff to look into the situation at 356 Haig and report back to Council with the results of their investigation, if that’s even an accurate word for whatever it is that they might do, or for that matter find. From my perspective, a staff investigation involves bitching about having to do it in the first place, followed by a shoulder shrug, which is more or less the results of most staff-led investigations.
His final notice of motion sought a resolution to the 113 Otteridge hose-down, where the Councillor is seeking a repayment to the owners to cover the amount they were over-charged on their water bill. The water bill was for $749. The average water bill was $165. The Councillor wants to see the town cough up the difference between the two figures, some $584, not exactly McDonald’s money, although getting close as even fast food becomes more and more unaffordable.
Sp props to Councillor Dick for making these notices, particularly the last two. What becomes of them is anyone’s guess. My bet is that a legitimate report is tendered by staff on the first point, but that the last two points go behind closed doors, where all issues go when the stink arising from them begins to waft into the community consciousness.
Although very similar to swatting flies with a blindfold on, at least the councillor is swatting, and by doing so, forcing staff to either uncover some embarrassing facts about their own potential mis-management or forcing them to retreat behind closed doors where all inconvenient enquiries go to die. If the first, they may be unearthing some incompetence. In the latter, they may be demonstrating continued subterfuge and a form of corporate disingenuousness.
You can take your pick, but neither looks good. It’s also important to say that they don’t care.
But Councillor Dick does.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 