A year later

It has been a year since a group on council ousted its top manager, Merlin Dewing. Dewing had been hired to fix the County’s serious structural problems—runaway costs, broken infrastructure, poor accountability and moribund marketing and economic development.

He made enemies along the way. He knew that. He had come here to do a job—not to make friends. Within a couple of years, he had managed to reorganize County operations from top to bottom—extracting over a million dollars in overhead costs. He had challenged communities and friends groups to coalesce around their town halls, libraries and facilities or risk losing them.

He reminded council and the community at every turn that the municipality’s path was unsustainable. We have roads and bridges we can’t afford to repair. We have 120 properties and 88 buildings but scarcely a dime put away to pay for their renewal and upkeep. It is a train headed straight toward County taxpayers that few wish to acknowledge. Dewing forced council to face these challenges head on.

Dewing established new training and job advancement programs. In return, he demanded accountability and productivity. No longer would the County continue do something just because it had always done so.

He renegotiated contracts—he didn’t farm it out to the County’s legal advisors. He took on the reorganization and restructuring himself. He didn’t pass these asssignments off to consultants. These weren’t safe choices. He knew his actions would draw fire. In his view, that was his job.

He encouraged and, at times, insisted that council put its shoulder into policy making and governing rather than day-to-day management. He established procedures to train council members on the job they were elected to do.

And yet, not every move was the right one. Not every decision was sound. Good folks left the County ranks in the ensuing upheaval. Turning around a $50-million municipality that had become so encrusted with complacency, opaque procedures and a ballooning tax rate was bound to break more than bad habits. But not doing anything would be far worse.

In time, these and other measures might have put the County on a sustainable financial footing. In time, it might have enabled council to restore credibility with the electorate it serves. But we will never know.

Council decided it had had enough tough decisions. It had had enough of Dewing telling them what they could and could not do. If they wanted a County backhoe to dig out a ditch for a constituent, who was Dewing to say they couldn’t?

The people elected us to make decisions, councillors chanted to themselves, over and over again.

So Dewing had to go. In a matter of days, Council was back in charge.

A year later and there is no more talk about streamlining services or cutting costs. There is no more discussion about staff training or achievement. There is no debate at all about the strength of the organization or improvements that can be made. No discussion about long-term goals or ambitions.

We are right back to seat-of-the-pants decision making that defined County council for the decade after amalgamation. Short term thinking. Quick fixes. Harebrained schemes (remember the accelerated roads program and the $11 million of debt that dud left behind?).

Meanwhile, our roads and bridges are getting worse. Yet we conjure plans to sink $7 million of County taxpayers’ dollars (about three-quarters of our annual roads capital expenditures) into a single road? [As though it will alter the County’s decaying infrastructure trajectory one millimetre.] Or sink the better part of $1 million into Union Road—a few-hundred-metres long shortcut between County Road 2 and Highway 62.

Our waterworks is a financial mess—yet citizens have mostly refused to raise their hands this time around to sit on the committee tasked with finding solutions. It should come as no surprise.

Most County residents have concluded that council isn’t listening. They learned that in 2010, when 81 per cent of the electorate voted for change in the size of council and they were ignored. It was reinforced when a Citizens’ Assembly hammered out a recommendation to reduce council size to 10 councillors plus a mayor. Again, they were ignored. And most recently, when County residents were asked to complete a survey on the issue—Council ignored the findings—choosing, instead, a plan that kept their numbers mostly intact.

Councillor Gord Fox acknowledged as much as he urged his colleagues to refrain from reaching for easy solutions in attracting building investment to the County.

“It is a big mistake,” said Fox. “If we do this, we will continue to lose the trust of the voters.”

The councillors concern has come too late. That trust has all but evaporated.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca