Regrets

It was a scrappy meeting. Backing out of the mess they had created at Lake of the Mountain was bound to bring long-simmering irritations to the surface. But there was more to this bout of irritability. So many Zoom meetings. So many reminders to “turn your mic on” or “turn YouTube off”. So many frozen screens stranding everyone else in digital limbo—unable to move forward or back. Two years of this would try the patience of a saint.

But there seemed a more biting edge to the debate at the committee meeting of Council at the end of February. There was a twang that could not be accounted for by the vagaries of Zoom or the delicate task of extracting 14 folks from the pile of poo into which they had stepped last year.

It is predictable that Councils tend to get a bit chippy with each other by the fourth year of the term. By now they know pretty well what their colleague will say and that they are likely to take four to eight minutes to say it. But mostly it’s about the fact that time slipped by faster than they thought. They had hoped to get more done. They are now on the backstretch— just 33 weeks until the next municipal election. Regret is starting to pile up.

So it was that last week Council was faced with the unhappy task of undoing their handcrafted solution to Lake on the Mountain— though, by now, it seemed that at least half were no longer sure there was ever a problem. The evidence that the park and restaurants overlooking Adolphus Reach pose a safety hazard has proved hard to substantiate. That this wasn’t tabled before Council made its decision to eliminate parking on the shoulders of this short stretch of County Road 7 last year surely made the task of unwinding that decision more maddening.

It was seat-of-the-pants decision-making, and I suspect many of them understood the botched episode would come to define this term. This was not what most had signed up for.

Councillor Ernie Margetson did a masterful job of keeping members focused and moving forward as chair of the session, even as the mood lurched from weariness to exasperation. Not that the meeting was liable to veer off the rails—there is enough residual respect for each other and the institution of council for that to have been a serious risk. Rather, I suspect, we now have at least ten fresh converts of the notion that Council must become smaller.

It is an old and familiar battle in this community. For more than a decade ‘size of Council’ was the principal debate in Prince Edward County. Nearly 81 per cent voted in favour of a review of Council size in a 2010 ballot question. Council chose to ignore the result—suggesting it did not reflect the will of the silent majority. The ballot question preceded a fruitless challenge to the Ontario Municipal Board brought by residents Lyle McBurney and Jim McPherson in 2009. Council later agreed to form a Citizens’ Assembly in 2013, which subsequently recommended Council shrink from 16 to 11 members. Still nothing. By 2015, Council could ignore the will of the people no longer and, so, agreed to drop two council members. That is how we have 14 council members today.

The problem, however, hasn’t gone away. If anything, the challenges of a 14-member Council have become more pronounced. Despite a general weariness with the subject, it has become blindingly obvious to most observers, inside the County and out, that this Council is just too unwieldy for functional decision- making. (See David Simmonds Ground Hog Day on January 20, 2022.)

Local government has no parties or allegiances. All fourteen council members are independent. Free agents. They are neither bound nor guided by organized actions or messaging. Just fourteen folks going their own way. That may seem like a good thing—but it makes for messy decision-making. Meetings are too long. It takes a long time for 14 people to have their say. And comment on what the other 13 said. Decisions are too easily punted or delayed. Questions go unanswered. Other questions go unasked for fear of further delay.

The result is that the sheer size and cumbersomeness of Council impairs the oversight role of Council. They cannot afford to peer deeply or broadly into an issue for fear of derailing other municipal business.

What else explains a decade and a half without a coherent roads plan in this County? Or a broken housing market in which costs spiral to the stratosphere, as new homebuilding is mired in years-long delays and multi-residential buildings are thwarted by a handful of neighbours? These are fundamental communitywarping challenges that go unaddressed year after year, decade after decade—yet Council wanders up to Lake of the Mountain to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

Last month, Shire Hall tinkered with its procedural bylaws. The leadership folks would never say it was about fixing the dysfunction of this body, but it is easily inferred from the recommended changes. While a tacit acknowledgement of the problems posed by an unwieldy Council of this size, alterations to the procedural bylaw won’t fix it.

So here we are again. Most residents, denizens of Shire Hall, and I expect most council members, know their assembly must get smaller to become more effective. More agile. More responsive. More probing. To do their job.

Therefore we must have this dreaded debate again. It is an election year. Perhaps the most enduring contribution this term of Council might make is to restart the process to getting smaller. Go bold. Seven council members including the mayor. Elected by every voter. (After 24 years we are a single County. It is time to move past parochial sentimentality. It isn’t working. Not in South Bay, Cressy, Green Point, West Lake or Carrying Place.)

We need deep structural change. We have burned through too many good folks on Council. They are not a renewable resource. How on earth will we recruit folks willing to commit their time, energy, experience and skill to this role when they can’t do the job we elected them to do? The job they raised their hand to do.

If they can’t do this,we must ask the province to do it.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca