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.

Renfrew’s Public Works Garage is no longer in poor shape.

It would be better and more accurate to say that the garage, the hub for Renfrew’s fleet of public works vehicles and staff, is in catastrophic shape.  And it has been for years.

This building has been in bad need of work, repairs, and interventions since the turn of the century, which is a hell of a thing to say given the fact that we’re already a quarter of the way through that century.  Yet council after council has sacrificed this municipal property on the altar of budget deficits, shunting it aside as less a priority than the other things that have been funded for over these past twenty-five years.

But now the problems appear to coming home to roost.  Now it appears that a kid throwing a rock at the building may well put the structure in an existential calamity, since the whole place could come crumbling down with as much as an unduly harsh look, never mind a child’s rock.

And all of this against the backdrop of the biggest budget crisis in the town’s history, a crisis that will linger for decades.  And as these things go, the Public Works Garage, ignored for all of these years as money was thrown into things like Ma-Te-Way and office furniture for the Town Hall, remains not only in crisis, but also as a danger to the employees and the equipment headquartered there.

It appears it can’t be ignored any longer.  And right at a time we can least afford to do anything about it.  Funny, not funny, how these things go.