Quit criticizing, stay away, don’t bother us

EDITORIAL COMMENT

By Meade Helman AWARE News Network December 14 2012 

This is supposed to be a democracy, but our BWG council seems to be working hard to eliminate any and all citizen input since the last election.

OR as one of our councillors told me, “ We were elected so quit criticizing and let us (and the staff) do our jobs.” Oh sorry, I thought your job was to work for us (the residents) and make our community one everyone shares in.

Since the election a number of disturbing things have happened. Mayor Doug White introduced a motion that would cut the council meetings to two instead of three a month and eliminate the committee of the whole meetings altogether. The result was they kept committee of the whole but cut council to twice a month. Now council meetings often last until 11:00 p.m., discouraging attendance by people that have to get up early to work. It also means that councillors have as much as 300 pages of reading before the meetings.. One has to ask if they read all of that.

Then Mayor White introduced a proposed purchasing polices that would allow staff to proceed with any purchase in the budget without council oversight and approval. Fortuntely, council voted it down.

Then there was the staff report about dumping fill and fill by-laws. Town Legal counsel said that it could be implemented without any public input in the permit process. While many on council thought this was a good idea because the public just slows things down, it hasn’t come up again.

Due to public pressure, a total accounting was done on the Dissette project. Much to the surprise of council the project was $17 mil over budget. Councillors Crake and Hordyck felt that we should chalk this up to lessons learned and move on. Mayor White said that he wasn’t going to let any of staff “be thrown under the bus” for this. What was done about it? Nothing. In fact since Mayor White is pushing very hard to go forward on the 5th line interchange without having any idea of the real costs or financing. But he says “The town needs this and when we need the money it will be there.” Can you imagine running a business that way?

Now council is considering a move to limit public forum discussions to items on the agenda, which is set by staff.

Why does anyone wonder why voter turnout is down?