The Mumpsimus Blog site: The Mumpsimus Blog site -> Rules bind us, but not the county...

It will be interesting to see how some members of Collingwood Council handle the inevitable requests for funding that arrive outside the town's budget process, next year. In the past, most councillors have stuck to the line that, if a request is made outside the budget process, no matter how worthy of consideration, it will be refused.*

Rules! they say; we have to stick to The Rules. We have to follow The Process!

But apparently it's okay with them that Simcoe County Council doesn't. Nor did it seem to concern several of my colleagues that $250,000 of your taxes for PR cosmetics was merely handed out, not tendered. The county ALREADY spends $1.1 million annually on a communications department, but the county's politicians deemed it necessary to go to an outside firm at added cost to the taxpayer for their election-year makeover.

Monday night we received a letter from Tiny Township council objecting to this expenditure. I asked to have the letter pulled and made a recommendation to endorse that resolution.

I wrote about the county's decision in a previous entry. Last month, when I posted that piece, I commented that, "...if we're going to spend taxpayers' money polishing someone's image after a bad public reaction to a political decision, why aren't we spending money to repair Collingwood's own reputation after the debacle that resulted in what might have been the signature development in our downtown now being only a dirty pond on the main street for the last three years? (Although I doubt any PR firm would want to tackle what may be an impossible task.)"

The motion to endorse Tiny's objection was, predictably, defeated. The mayor was opposed - he was a strong supporter of spending your taxes on an untendered consultant to polish the county's image, so that was expected. So were Councillors Edwards, Jeffrey and Sandberg. These didn't surprise me, since in general they vote with the mayor. I wonder if residents will still feel comfortable in using the phrase "fiscally responsible" to describe some of them, after that.

The real surprise was Deputy Mayor Cooper, who, in an unusual vote, sided with the mayor. But, it turned out, she had also supported the county council decision on the expenditure.

Supporting the endorsement - the minority of council who thought it was wrong to spend the money on self-aggrandizement, and felt the process of handing out large, untendered contracts was improper - were McNabb, Foley, Labelle and myself. It was a recorded vote.

So the next time some community group comes to council after the budget has been approved, begging for money, I wonder how these five will respond.

~~~~~
* Our often parsimonious council has rejected requests on that basis in the past. We've turned away community groups and charities which came with cap in hand after the deadline for form-filling had passed - even though these small, volunteer-run groups clearly didn't fully grasp the bureaucratic process. But our council has also refused requests that arrived on time, with i's respectfully dotted and t's dutifully crossed. Council, for example, refused to spend $25,000 help build a desperately-needed animal shelter. Yet the same majority of council had no problem spending more than $400,000 of your taxes on legal bills to fight the mayor's cherished battle against educational development charges, even after we lost the challenge at the OMB. Now, how is that being fiscally responsible?