Requesting staff reports

[indent]There are times at council when I imagine that, in the Tuesday morning department heads meeting following a council session, eyes are rolled and heads shaken when our requests for staff reports are trotted out for discussion.

Council asks for a lot of reports. A lot. Many of these reports are information we need to do our political business, or to make informed decisions. Many requests ask for recommendations that we may consider - albeit not necessarily accept. Some, true, are requested to bolster a personal goal or agenda. Some are asked in order to delay making a decision.

Some requests, yes, are pretty flighty and are made for reasons beyond the normal ken of council watchers.

The cat licensing bylaw, for example, must have garnered more than a few shakes when it was first proposed, a few terms back. Aside from being basically unenforceable, it's a fatuous regulation. I'm sure there was renewed eye-rolling on the recent request to come up with a report on how to locate where feral cats were living so the property owners could be fined if a feral cat was trapped on some other resident's property.

I can see the bylaw officers crawling around in the hedges calling, "Here kitty, kitty, kitty," as they search for the nesting grounds of a feral animal. ten malining out a ticket to some absentee property owner for trapping an animal he or she didn't even know was under ther porch. Heads should be shaking, yes indeed.

Surely staff ask themselves, "What were they thinking?" when these requests come up at the meeting. They might wonder if the length of the meeting and the closed doors resulted in a lack of oxygen, so that, by late evening, councillors were feeling light-headed and whimsical. In those times, council seems to be enacting a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

Why, for example, didn't council ask staff to report on licensing unicorns while we were asking how to locate the abode of feral cats? Both seem to be on par, as far as common sense goes*.

No matter why they're requested, someone on staff has to prepare these reports. That takes time and effort - often time and effort that would be better spent on something more pressing.

I imagine our CAO reading out this latest request, while department heads duck or try to avoid eye contact so they won't be called upon to be given the task. Some contemplate their Blackberries as if a sudden burst of must-respond email was delivered. Some shuffle through paperwork, hunting for an urgent task that can be produced to counter the anti-productive request. Others find remarkable interest in a spot on the ceiling, their unwinking gaze drawing the attention of others until a large group is transfixed on the tile-work over their heads, hoping they won't be picked.

I always seem to find a suitable response in Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoons when contemplating such issues. They're sort of like organizational or bureaucratic Zen; little visual koans of wit and wisdom that bring the issue into sharp perspective. These panels come from an older collection I was browsing through today, and they just struck me as right for the moment.

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* Councillor McNabb was on CBC Ontario Morning just after 6 a.m. today, being interviewed on his ideas about feral cats and cat trapping. He must have been quite sleepy because, to least to my ears, he was unable to articulate his position very clearly. When host Mike Ewing asked why he supported a fee for a service most residents would think came with paying their taxes, McNabb fumbled for a response and seemed to drift off track. Still trying to get his head around the idea, I suppose.
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