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.

Continue reading “SPEAKING TO BE UNDERSTOOD” →