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Missing
Have you seen County council? They were first reported missing more than a year ago. Since then, a few traces have turned up here and there, but no confirmed sightings. When last seen they were wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Keep calm and ignore the size of council.”
September is usually a busy time at Shire Hall. During the prolonged summer break, council meets as a committee on just two occasions over July and August. So September meetings tend to be stuffed with County business. Matters that have been put off for months. Approvals that have been languishing on desks. Tenders to be let. And then there are those lingering issues that defy easy resolution. It all adds up to a busy, jam-packed month. Not so much lately, though. The first committee meeting last month was cancelled. It was unclear that enough councillors would show up. Some were away at a conference. Others were busy with their day jobs. So rather than risk the chance the meeting would fail to reach a quorum, the first September meeting was cancelled. Not postponed. Not rescheduled. Cancelled. In another term of council, this would result in a massive agenda for the second meeting in September. Soup would be brought in. Squares would be baked. And council members would settle in for a long day poring through reports, asking questions, raising issues and insisting on answers. But this isn’t like any other term of council. There is little, it seems, for them to do. Nothing particularly noteworthy to talk about. Nothing to fix. Shire Hall, it seems, hums along without the oversight of its governing council. It is hard to know if this is a good or bad thing.
So it was that council met as a committee for the first time in a month last Thursday. For the better part of an hour, council chewed over the light spilling from a gas station in Wellington onto neighbouring homes. You know by now faithful readers, that council loves playing Judge Judy in such neighbourhood disputes. It is why they wander so carelessly and repeatedly into swamps like the noise bylaw. It is why they have to talk about the use of staff trucks every few months. These are the issues council can get its teeth into and toss around excitedly for hours. They feel they are doing the people’s work.
Now council didn’t actually do anything about the light/neighbour issue last week. They just talked. The remainder of the agenda was wrapped up in about 30 minutes. They agreed to form a committee to consider what to do about Canada’s 150th birthday next year.
They rolled over an agreement to manage the Wellington beach. They balked at spending $307,000 to make 55 King Street a proper parking lot, agreeing only to install an electric vehicle charging station.
They were back outside in the sunshine and headed home, an hour and a half after they had entered Shire Hall. To be fair, council members sit on other committees, boards and advisory groups. They sit as council twice a month and a planning meeting each month. Indeed, the work of council member extends beyond Shire Hall into the community in which they serve. There is no question that many attend to these duties assiduously.
But occasionally County council might be expected to do some council business. To act. To govern. Something. Allow me to throw out a for-instance. The County has a half-billion-dollar infrastructure bill coming due over the next decade or two. More than $200 million is due right now. We can only spend about $10 million each year. So the hole gets bigger. Each and every year. We don’t talk about this. We have no plan. We don’t talk about making a plan. Instead, we dream about replacing Highway 49—a project that all by itself would cost more than $20 million. The County doesn’t have anything like that kind of money, and it would be reckless to the point of fiduciary irresponsibility to spend it this way even if it did. It’s like dreaming about buying a sleek new powerboat while the roof over your home leaks so badly your kids need umbrellas to make their lunches.
Two big County issues have been assigned to ad hoc committees—the County’s broken waterworks and the lack of residential building resulting in anemic growth in the tax base. These are big, complex issues that require the time and insight that such citizen/staff/council representative assemblies provide.
There are extra seats, however, around the edge of each of these tables. Council members, not part of the committee, are welcome to sit in, listen to the discussion, hear the issues and the arguments back and forth, first hand. Very few take advantage of this opportunity.
So one of two things will happen: either the entire months-long debate will be litigated again when it reaches the council table, or, given recent practice, the more likely scenario will see council usher the committee’s recommendation through unsullied by council examination.
But perhaps there is a simpler, more conspicuous way to measure whether this term of council when, or if, council regains a pulse.
Late in the previous term of council, the County undertook to rebuild and redesign its website, pecounty.on.ca. About a year later it changed the front page ever so slightly, adding a corner tag proclaiming that a new site was coming soon. Another year has since ticked by and the website continues make the same promise—oblivious to the fact that soon passed by a long time ago.
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